Polo

How Coachella actually works: the polo club that stopped playing polo, the roads, the buses, the tents named for deserts, the money, the moments, the pyramid, and every billboard on the drive in.

16 chapters · 36,740 words · 514 sources · 29 years · 72 billboards · updated October 2026

Start reading The pyramid The billboards Play polo One page

00Prologue: a polo field and a boycottIn November 1993, Pearl Jam would not play Los Angeles on Ticketmaster's terms, so a small punk promoter called Goldenvoice put them on a polo field in Indio for about…01The beginningGoldenvoice was a punk promoter paid for by its founder's marijuana smuggling, handed to two young employees when he went to prison. Their first festival, in October…02Every yearEvery edition on one page, from Pearl Jam's polo-field show in 1993 to the 2026 sellout. A $50 day ticket became a $649 weekend, two days became six, and the gross…03The groundsFor 22 years Coachella was a tenant, renting a polo club in Indio for a few weeks each spring and handing it back. Goldenvoice bought the land next door in 2012, and in…04The polo clubYou pay a lot of money every year to hang out at a polo club, and the polo club stopped playing polo. It ended in November 2021, when Goldenvoice took over Empire…05The stages and the spaces withinCoachella opened in 1999 with a main stage, a second stage and three tents named for deserts, and it has been adding rooms ever since. The Sahara has moved three times…06Daft Punk and the pyramidIn 2006 Daft Punk said yes to Coachella after a year of saying no, because their manager, who usually turned offers down without asking them, picked up the phone. They…07The momentsThe sets people still bring up, and what the paperwork says happened. A Prince cover that kept getting pulled offline, a dead rapper reflected off a sheet of foil, a…08What Coachella startedThe things that left the polo field and kept going: reunions that became world tours (one grossed $584.2M), a second weekend Austin City Limits copied, and a webcast…09Getting thereAbout 40,000 people a day ride a shuttle into Indio, and the company that runs it isn't Goldenvoice - it's a travel outfit owned, three layers up, by private equity. The…10Camping and the ritualsCamping began in 2003 and cars joined in 2010; now about 35,000 people sleep on the grounds. The festival starts for them on Thursday - in a Walmart lot, a Ralphs lot, a…11The lineup and the posterOne man reads thousands of pitches a year, picks about 150 acts, and sets every name on the poster in one typeface at one of several sizes - a size agents fight over.…12The build, the art, the ticket, the foodCoachella is built from an empty polo field in about five weeks, and taken down again in time for Stagecoach. That means a PA crew that has done it for nearly two…13The money and IndioThe last published gross is $114.6M, for 2017. Since then the festival's own numbers have gone quiet, and the figures that do get printed come from the city, the tourism…14The valley and the seasonCoachella is two weekends in a longer desert season. The same polo field hosts a country festival the week after, which outsold it in 2024, and has held classic-rock and…15The billboards on the I-10Every spring, artists and labels rent billboards on the interstate between Los Angeles and Indio, because there is one road in and the people driving it are exactly the…