30 BILLBOARD • MARCH 28, 2020COACHELLA: CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK. CODE ORANGE: TIM SACCENTI. ROSE: DANIEL BOCZARSKI/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES. MUÑOZ: RAY TAMARRA/GETTY IMAGES.A
T THE END OF
February, Live
Nation president/
CEO Michael Rapino
told investors on a
conference call that he
expected the coro-
navirus to affect less than 1% of their
overall business. A week later, Miami’s
Ultra Music Festival was called off;
two days after that, Austin’s South by
Southwest was canceled. That same
day, March 6, Rapino and AEG COO
Jay Marciano, along with heads of
the top four talent agencies, formed a
private task force. Now, executives at
AEG credit that alliance with helping
Coachella avoid a cancellation, too.
Within days of AEG learning that
public health officials from Riverside
County in California — which includes
Indio, Coachella’s event grounds —
would not permit the festival to take
place as planned starting on April 10,
Marciano quickly received approval
to move it to October. It wasn’t hard,
sources say, to get at least some
scheduled performers and their agents
to commit to the new dates because
the artists wouldn’t get paid if they
didn’t perform — and the agents
wouldn’t get their commissions. (Plus,
AEG did promote the one-off DesertTrip in October 2016, so the regulatory
framework for a fall Coachella was
already in place to some degree.) By
March 10, Goldenvoice had officially
announced that both weekends of
Coachella, as well as its country music
festival Stagecoach, would still happen
in 2020 — only six months later than
planned. More recently, Bonnaroo
announced its four-day festival, which
this year features headliners Tool,
Lizzo and Tame Impala, will take place
in September. And while Chicago’s
Lollapalooza typically happens in early
August, it recently delayed announcing
its lineup, saying in a statement that
the festival will take place “as soon as
it’s safe for us all to be together.”
However, industry sources at
Goldenvoice and elsewhere say that
saving Coachella was much more
difficult than many realize, reveal-
ing that some of the headliners stillhaven’t agreed to perform in October.
It shows how many hurdles promot-
ers face in order to reschedule just
one large-scale live-music event. Plus,
no one at AEG or Goldenvoice admits
to having a concrete sense of how,
or even if, a 125,000-person festival
that costs nearly $100 million can
be seamlessly moved and if enough
people will even be available to build
and stage Coachella in the fall. “But we
don’t want to give up being first,” said
one AEG executive of announcing a
new slate of dates as soon as possible
instead of pulling the plug. “That’s re-
ally valuable.” (Veteran promoter and
Coachella co-founder Paul Tollett, 54,
declined to comment for this article.)
Since Coachella’s inaugural year in
1999, the event has remained the unof-
ficial festival season kickoff. And now,
by being the first such event to seem-
ingly avoid cancellation, Coachella hascontinued to lead the way. The festival,
whose headliners for the original April
dates included Travis Scott, Frank
Ocean and Rage Against the Machine,
has now become a peculiar litmus test
for the fate of several similar gather-
ings whose immediate futures are still
uncertain. “If we can’t pull this festival
off in October, then we’re going to
be in a really bad place as a civiliza-
tion,” says one booking agent who has
booked headliners and support acts
at Coachella for over a decade. “At a
minimum, it’s going to be a very bad
sign for the business.”
Presuming that Goldenvoice does
pull off a fall Coachella, though,
there’s the unknown level of disrup-
tion it may cause to that touring sea-
son. Pushing festivals that normally
take place earlier in the summer to
the fall will surely affect the schedules
of many artists playing those lineups,
with dates that bump up against care-
fully plotted radius clauses that were
put into place to avoid this exact kind
of overlap in bookings. Already, a de-
layed festival season is taking its toll
on artist promotional cycles. As Doris
Muñoz, founder of Mija Mgmt —
whose clients include Cuco and Jas-
per Bones — puts it: “Everything is on
pause. These festivals are essentially
tentpoles to build content around. We
have to shift our plans.”
Moving Coachella, in particular, to
October also means its first weekend
falls on the same dates as the second
weekend of the annual Austin City
Limits gathering. While the festivals
will be 1,400 miles apart, AEG is left
to guess if the entire industry has
employed enough people to staff two
massive events at the same time. And
before Coachella 2020 is even here yet,
its organizers are already wondering
what to do about 2021. “Can [Coach-
ella] come back six months later and
do another festival? Will that work?”
asks one AEG executive who chooses
to remain anonymous.
It’s possible that having another
Coachella so soon might diminish de-
mand, and a hypothetical 20% drop in
attendance, according to AEG, could
lead to millions in losses. But for now,
thanks to the task force, Rapino and
Marciano have agreed to continue
supporting each other through this
ongoing crisis. “That’s all they could
do because no one has any idea if
it’s going to be safe to do a concert
in October or if fans will come out,”
says one source. “There’s so much
uncertainty right now, it’s very hard
to plan the next chapter until things
settle down.”Empty Coachella
festival grounds.“If we can’t pull this festival off
in October, then we’re going to be in
a really bad place as a civilization.”
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