What can festival posters tell us about the state of the music industry?

Coachella — the highly anticipated music festival held over two weekends in April — saw its lowest ticket sales in 10 years. Passes for the first weekend have yet to sell out after six days of being on sale. Previously, passes have sold out fairly quickly. In 2015, the festival sold out in an hour. In 2022, it took half a day for passes to sell out. 

With it being summer festival announcements season, a large part of the appeal of festivals like Coachella, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza are the posters. Before buying weekend passes and booking flights, music fans look to the headliners on a bill, then peruse the smaller acts to see if they like enough of the artists to go. 

But Stereogum writer Tom Breihan doesn't look at festival posters the same way as everyone else. He spends a lot of time analyzing the Coachella poster each year. What he sees are the politics of the music industry: who the dominant players are, whose stock is rising and who is being relegated to the small print.

Breihan joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to explain what the posters from this year's summer music festivals can tell us about the politics of popular music.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Breihan says the difference between the way the promotional poster for Coachella is formatted versus other music festivals is the merciless nature of the font sizes it uses. 

"Say you were booked to perform at Coachella and you were really excited, you get to go out to the desert and play in a tent that's the size of an aircraft carrier and make a lot of money doing it. You might then be bummed when the poster comes out and you were in the teeny tiny font, so you need a magnifying glass to see your own name," he says. "It lays out a certain hierarchy in a very obvious way that I appreciate because of how mean it is."

After working as a critic for 20 years, Breihan says the Coachella poster still surprises him with how many acts he doesn't know. He says the festival used to only book electronic and dance music DJs, but now, he doesn't know 40 per cent of the bill. 

"I'm like, 'Who are these people?' It used to always be dance DJs. But now sometimes it's TikTok people, or a K-pop act that has no real profile over here. And it's always interesting to pick through and figure out how they arrived on these people and how they decided that some of them are bigger draws than others." 

This year, the headlines for Coachella are: Lana Del Ray, Tyler the Creator and Doja Cat. 

Breihan says these choices for headlines tells us that budgets for festivals are shrinking. He says Coachella always likes to make a big splash with their headliners, like they did last year, by getting Frank Ocean. But that was a bad idea.The R&B singer made impromptu set changes, delayed his set by an hour, and played very few songs before walking off stage. He cancelled for weekend two, with Blink-182 taking his spot on the bill. 

So what Coachella is doing now, says Breihan, is trying to book artists with big cultish fanbases who the organizers know will buy tickets. 

"So I think what we're seeing now is a little bit of a refocusing. All of these artists sort of harken back to Coachella's alternative culture roots, even though none of them are what you really call alternative rock artists," he says. 

"Lana Del Rey is the closest thing, and you can't say that she rocks like that. They're all based in Southern California, and they all have sounds that are sort of stuck to the Southern California aesthetic. They're all younger. Doja has big pop hits. The other two really don't. They all have big, big, big, big cult fan bases. And they're all strong live performers."

Another trend he says Coachella is capitalizing on is the popularity of international artists, specifically Spanish speaking artists due to the recent popularity of artists like Bad Bunny, Rosalía and Karol G.

"They're definitely going all in on the international thing, which I think is interesting and is cool. Because for one thing, there are a whole lot of Spanish speaking artists all up and down the bill from all across the Spanish music diaspora. Peso Pluma is in one of the 'right below the headliner' spots," says Breihan. "And if you go to Coachella, it is not all rich white kids. It's certainly all rich kids, but it's rich kids from a diverse set of backgrounds."

Lastly, according to Breihan, this might be the best the Coachella organizers can do, because they know they're not going to get Beyoncé again.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman