By Ace Santizo
!!WARNING: This is my personal opinion on the matter and is being used for entertainment purposes, this was not made to offend or make anyone feel bad about wanting to attend Coachella!!
Coachella is one of the most well known successful music and art festivals in the world, people fly from across the world just to get a taste of what this festival is like, with incredibly built art installations and well known celebrities attending. Incredible style everywhere you turn and absolute fun. But is it all worth it?
Many people enjoy this festival and I do understand why, I do also however want to bring awareness to the never ending controversies and issues that are brought along with Coachella, regarding the payment for the musicians playing at the festival, the environmental impact, how it’s more of an influencer business than a festival, and the amount of clothing consumption and waste done at Coachella. These are incredibly important issues that have to be addressed to create a better environment and future for such a successful business.
As of today the tickets for Coachella were quite expensive costing around $429 per person for general admission, however the prices rely on tiers, meaning the $429 is the cheapest offer you can get, and the prices range all the way up to $1,000 and much more not including food, drinks, or hospitality while you attend. There were more than 750,000 attending, meaning there was more than enough money to be paying these amazing musicians who spent their nights and voices up on those stages. However many of these artists weren’t all paid the same amount, many didn’t even make much profit compared to other artists who were also playing at the event. Each artist was paid differently, many got paid in the high millions such as the Weekend who had to fight for the payment, while others only got a couple hundred thousands and many spoke out about it in coachella of 2018. This has been extremely apparent in many articles over the years surrounding Coachella and its payment methods, one of these being an article made in April 10, 2019 by yahoo!finance. There are also a lot of other issues regarding how the money from the festival is being used. A large amount of the profit made from the event has been used by the owner of Coachella to give to major anti-LGBTQ+ foundations and politicians instead of giving that money back to those in need and the actual artists and musicians they hire who make Coachella such a big hyped up event. Not only does the profit go to not very harmful organizations but the whole event can be quite harmful to the environment. Now Coachella does try and make an effort to address the environmental impact but it’s not the greatest effort. There’s a lot of different factors into the harmful impact of the festival, there's the transportation (cars, planes, buses, etc.), installing the artwork, setting up stages, the plastic used for food and drinks, a lot of left behind tents and trash, and the huge clothing consumption issue. According to Earth.org, “fast fashion is clothing that is made with very low quality material to meet trends that are quickly becoming larger and are then discarded when the trend dies down for incredibly cheap.” Coachella is basically the trend in this scenario and everyone is trying to find this fast fashion clothing they will never wear again for the coachella weekend to stand out in the crowd. This creates a lot of clothing consumption that will be discarded incredibly fast and most likely won’t be recycled in the way it should be or put in thrift stores for others to use. Which creates an enormous amount of waste in just clothing, not to mention the thousands of tents and trash left abandoned after the Coachella weekend is over, and the amount of waste also left behind from the huge art installations. Not to mention many people don’t even go to enjoy the festival at all, but instead use it as a business opportunity and get themselves invited to other surrounding parties farther away from the fairgrounds in which more transportation is being used more often. There is a lot more hype in trying to get into these parties than to actually enjoy what the event really has to offer, and a lot of corporations rely on these parties and sponsor them, such as the Mcdonalds event. There are also a lot of corporations who use Coachella to their advantage and sponsor them with stands that really have no purpose, such as Fritos, Red bull, Cider, and so much more.
In the end there’s a lot that can be done by a lot of people in higher places. None of this was done to make others not go to Coachella, I still believe it's a pretty high energy event with a lot of potential if it would address a lot of its issues. In the end you get to decide on your own opinion just keep in mind everything that was stated.
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