Organizers of Coachella, the popular annual music festival in the desert east of San Diego, have synced up with a large telephone company to provide live, continuous webcast from Coachella Central featuring some of the most talented and popular artists in indie and alternative music.
Coachella has become in recent years the indie rock scene’s answer to Lollapoloza, and indie fans come from across the globe to attend the festival.
Three-day passes for this year’s event sold out in a matter of days and single day passes for the weekend sold out almost as quickly. Camp site passes are also sold out, but of course, there are many tickets still for sale on eBay.
For all of the indie rock fans who cannot make it to the festival, the webcast should help fill in some of the gap, even though it is nothing like being there – of course.
Let’s just hope that the technicians and other folks have the server load capacity to allow tens of thousands, maybe hundreds, of thousand of fans around the world hear great indie and alternative artists like:
The Arcade Fire
Rage Against The Machine
Bjork
Arctic Monkeys
Interpol
Sonic Youth
Red Hot Chilli Peppers
The Kooks
Tapes n Tapes
!!!
Rufus Wainwright
Air
Blonde Redhead
New Pornographers
The Decemberists
See the entire line-up of artists scheduled to play at Coachella
While some fans, like me, would like Coachella to lighten up a little more like the Burning Man festival, it seems unlikely to happen.
In fact, there is a direct contradiction of course with the idealism of what indie music should be and the fact the Coachella is a very capitalistic, corporate sponsored and highly secured event.
The latter being the most annoying to fans nowadays, but since the Woodstock reunion disaster in 1998, 9/11 and the Virginia Tech shootings, fans who already have their tickets to Coachella (they are still also available on eBay, but of course, you’ll pay more), their campsite passes or area accommodations (there are basically no motel or hotel rooms available for the festival weekend in the area with a few exceptions of rooms going for $500 and up a night at two and three-star accommodations).
