Chapter 01 of 15 · about 9 min read · updated October 2026

01The beginning

The first Coachella was so hot that a DJ's records melted. Kid Koala, one of nine acts from the label Ninja Tune, remembered "the vicious 100-plus-degree heat" and said "my vinyl started melting at one point."³ That was October 1999, in Indio, at $50 a day.³ It lost about a million dollars.³ The company that put it on had started 18 years earlier, as a way to spend smuggling money on punk shows.¹⁵

Punk money

Gary Tovar's first show was on December 4, 1981, at La Casa de la Raza in Santa Barbara: T.S.O.L., Shattered Faith and Rhino 39.¹⁵ He thought of Santa Barbara as the minor leagues, a place to practice "before I came into the majors."¹⁵ The company's name came from a favorite strain of Thai marijuana.⁸

That was not a joke. Tovar had been trafficking marijuana for about a decade before Goldenvoice existed, and OC Weekly says the pot money, "reaching into the double-digit millions," is what kept the shows running.¹⁵ They needed it. Tovar says he lost "$3 million to $4 million over 11 years," in 1980s dollars, roughly $300K to $400K a year.¹⁵ He told the Los Angeles Times how the two halves of his life fit:

"One of my hands was in punk rock... And my other hand was smuggling quality marijuana."⁸

Federal agents arrested him at his home on March 8, 1991.⁸ He pleaded guilty to four charges and served seven years in prisons in Arizona and Nevada.¹⁵ Before he went in, he signed Goldenvoice over to two of his employees, Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen.¹⁵ (The Times says the handover happened while he was inside, and The Ringer says shortly before. The result is the same.)⁸³

So the two men who booked Pearl Jam onto a polo field in 1993 were running a company they had been given, while its founder served his sentence.⁹ Tovar never stopped turning up. He is a consultant to Goldenvoice now, and he has not missed a Coachella since he got out.⁸

The pitch: "dance music is coming"

The Ringer has the best scene from the planning. Perry Farrell says Van Santen asked him in a Santa Monica hotel hot tub what he would do with a festival. His answer: "I was telling him dance music is coming."³ Farrell knew the risk. Of his own earlier Enit Festival, he said: "I did Enit, I lost a million dollars. And that was my own money."³

The bill Goldenvoice built for 1999 took the advice. Beck, Tool and Rage Against the Machine headlined, with the Chemical Brothers, Morrissey, A Perfect Circle, Jurassic 5 and Underworld underneath.¹⁶ Ninja Tune alone sent nine acts.³ The DJs got a tent of their own, and by 2002 the Sahara tent already had a laser show projected onto circular screens hung from its ceiling.¹⁷

October 1999

The first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival ran Saturday and Sunday, October 9-10, 1999, at the Empire Polo Club.³ Tickets were "a then-daunting $50 per day, plus fees."³

The timing was bad. The infamous Woodstock '99 had happened just two months earlier, and GRAMMY.com notes how much skepticism that left behind.¹⁶¹⁶ The weather was worse. October in Indio was still over 100 degrees.³

The crowd was about 17,000 to 20,000 a day, which The Ringer calls "barely more than half" of what Goldenvoice had hoped for.³ Wikipedia's figures make it about 37,000 tickets across both days, against a goal of 70,000.¹⁸ Far Out uses the same 37,000.¹⁹

"We knew we were dust"

The loss depends on who is counting. GRAMMY.com puts it at $850,000.¹⁶ Tollett, in a 2017 New Yorker profile quoted by The Ringer, put it at "around a million dollars."³ mxdwn's summary of the same profile gives the range, $850K to $1M, and says it nearly bankrupted Goldenvoice.²⁰ Tollett's own summary is three words long:

"We knew we were dust."³

The bands helped. "A couple bands let us slide," Tollett said.³ The best-known of them is Rage Against the Machine. Tom Morello told al.com that "the festival lost so much money they asked us for our fee back, which we gave them because they were friends."¹⁶ Far Out reports it was half the fee, not all of it.¹⁹ Morello's own wording doesn't say which.

According to the same profile, it took the festival four years to make money.²⁰

2000, the year off

There was no Coachella in 2000.¹⁶ The Ringer says only that the loss meant it "did not return in 2000 at all."³ Wikipedia adds that Goldenvoice had held October dates that year and cancelled them, with Tollett blaming too many festivals in Southern California.¹⁸ Nobody this project has read puts it more strongly than that.

2001: one day, in April, and a sale

When it came back, it was smaller and earlier. The 2001 festival was one day, Saturday April 28, and it moved to spring, when the desert is milder.²²⁴ The Ringer calls it a "pared-down one-day lineup."³ Jane's Addiction headlined, with Perry Farrell, who would play the first 12 Coachellas in one band or another.³

The rest of the bill came from both sides of the 1999 advice. Weezer, the Roots, Mos Def and Gang Starr were on it, and so were Fatboy Slim, Paul Oakenfold and the Chemical Brothers, who worked Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" into their set.²³ Sigur Rós played their first Southern California show.²³ The Daily Bruin counted 35,000 people; Wikipedia gives 32,000, at $65 a ticket.²³¹⁸

Whether 2001 made money is a real disagreement. Wikipedia quotes Tollett estimating a loss of a "low, low six-figure sum."¹⁸ Far Out says it was the year the promoters could finally "make a profit."¹⁹ Tollett's line about four years to turn a profit points to the first.²⁰

The bigger news that year was off the field. In 2001, Goldenvoice was sold to the live-music company AEG, Anschutz Entertainment Group.²⁴³ The price usually quoted is $7 million, for a sale agreed in March 2001. That figure comes from Wikipedia, and this project has not found the original report behind it.¹⁸ Tollett stayed in charge. In 2019 he described himself to the Los Angeles Times as "owner-operator of the show," and said: "I'm partners with AEG."²⁴

Building it back up

The festival grew a piece at a time.

• 2002: back to two days, with Björk second-to-last on the Saturday main stage, the Chemical Brothers closing it, and Oasis on Sunday.¹⁷
• 2003: camping arrived. OC Weekly's history of the campgrounds calls 2004 "the second year camping was permitted."²⁵ That December, Rick Van Santen died at home in Ventura County, aged 41, of flu-related complications.²⁶ He was co-president of Goldenvoice.²⁶
• 2004: the first sellout.⁴ NPR puts the crowd at 120,000; the Las Vegas Sun reported about 100,000 over two days, about 50,000 a day.⁴²⁷ A two-day pass was $142.²⁷ It was hot again: Saturday afternoon went past 100 degrees.²⁷ That same year AEG bought half of Coachella, and Tollett kept the other half.³ Palm Springs Life credits the purchase to AEG's then-CEO Tim Leiweke.²¹ Wikipedia, citing the New Yorker profile, says the deal also gave AEG the controlling interest.¹⁸
• 2007: three days for the first time, Friday April 27 to Sunday April 29, with Björk, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine on top.²⁸ A three-day pass was $249, and single days, at $85, were "very limited."²⁸ The first two days stayed on sale until the gates opened; the third, with Rage's reunion, "had sold out instantly."²⁹ Stagecoach, Goldenvoice's country festival, opened on the same grounds that spring.¹⁴
• 2008: the year Tollett says he lost the most money, with Prince headlining and Goldenvoice spending on Stagecoach at the same time.³ "I lost a lot of money in 2008," he told the Times in 2019.²⁴

Too many people

By 2010 the problem had flipped. For the first time the festival sold only three-day passes, at $269, and all 75,000 sold out in advance.³⁰ It still drew what the Las Vegas Sun later called "colossal crowds," with long entry lines and bad traffic.³¹ Tollett did not dodge it:

"The mistakes were in the planning."³¹

For 2011 Goldenvoice put a wrought-iron fence around the grounds to stop gate-crashers, paid toward an extra road lane in and out, and dropped the slow ticket-for-wristband swap.³¹ Tollett's summary of the fixes: "Fewer bodies. More land. Better traffic capabilities."³¹

Then, on May 31, 2011, he announced the move that defines the modern festival: in 2012 Coachella would run twice, on two weekends, with the same lineup.³² His reasons were demand and resale. "We had too many people who wanted to go," he told The Boombox, and he hated watching fans pay "$500-$600" on the secondary market.³² The obvious alternative was a bigger single weekend, and he turned it down:

"I didn't want to ruin the show by putting 40,000 more people in per day."³²

It worked at once. When 2012 passes went on sale, weekend one sold out in about 40 minutes and weekend two "within another two hours."³³ The two weekends earned $47.3M.³⁴

The curve

From there the numbers come from Pollstar and Billboard, and they only go one way.

The 2017 figure, $114,593,000 in Pollstar's year-end chart, made Coachella what GRAMMY.com, citing Billboard, called "the first reoccurring festival to break the $100 million mark in a single year."³⁸³⁴ (GRAMMY.com's headline calls it profit. It's a gross: ticket money in, before anyone gets paid.)³⁴ Dancing Astronaut, also crediting Billboard, put it as "the only reoccurring festival to gross over $100 million."³⁹ Billboard's own Power 100 the next year said Coachella "earned over $114.6 million in 2017."⁴⁰

A two-day pass in 2004 cost $142.²⁷ A pass in 2017 started at $399, according to Pollstar's range.³⁸ The festival that could not find 70,000 people in 1999 sold 250,000 tickets in 2017.¹⁸³⁸

Where the money goes is mostly the bill. Tollett told The New Yorker that each of the 2017 headliners, Radiohead, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar, was paid $3-4M, and that the acts at the bottom of the poster got a little under $10,000.⁴¹ The 1999 headliners had let him slide on their fees. Eighteen years later, one headliner cost several times what the whole first festival lost.³⁴¹

The partnership with AEG has not always been comfortable. When the Anschutz Foundation's donations to anti-LGBTQ groups became news in January 2017, Tollett told The New Yorker, as mxdwn reported: "I was offended. I run the festival, but it's rude to say that when you're a partner with someone."²⁰ The money chapter picks that up.

No gross has been published since 2017. The Ringer, in 2019, could only say "well over $100 million" a year, at about 125,000 people a day.³ Chapter 2 has every year, including the ones with blank cells.

What it took

Read in order, the beginning is a run of near-misses. A company paid for by smuggling money. A founder in prison. Two employees given the keys. A first festival in October heat, two months after Woodstock '99, at a loss that cost one of them his house.¹⁵¹⁶³ A year off. A one-day comeback. A sale to AEG.²⁴

Van Santen did not see the sellout.²⁶⁴ Tovar did, and he is still there every April.⁸

Still open

• The original source for the $7M AEG price. Contemporary reporting from March 2001 (LA Times, Billboard, Pollstar) would settle it.
• Did 2001 lose money or make it? Tollett's figure and Far Out's disagree, and neither cites a document.
• The 1999 attendance goal of 70,000 comes through Wikipedia. A 1999 Desert Sun or LA Times preview would confirm it.