In October of 1999, the very first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. The headliners were Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Morrissey, and the Chemical Brothers, groups still popular 17 years later. In 1999, Coachella tickets sold for $50 per day for a two day festival. So if a person wanted to attend both days, they would only be paying $100. This year Coachella is being held at the end of April and tickets start at a painful $399. A lot has changed since the first Coachella, most notably the price of the festival and the time of the year it is held. But recent news from The Desert Sun suggests that Goldenvoice, the company that runs the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, wants to hold another music festival at the Empire Polo Club in the fall.
Now, this doesn’t mean that it will be a music festival similar to the Coachella that we know today. Goldenvoice produces Stagecoach: California’s Country Music Festival in the Coachella Valley as well, so it could be a music festival of yet another musical genre. In the fall of 2000 they moved Coachella to the Spring of the next year and the Empire Polo Club played host to Nocturnal Wonderland, an EDM festival in the fall spot that Coachella was originally in. Another EDM festival could be held in the fall spot again the future, if Indio allows.
As of right now, we can only speculate what Goldenvoice may do for the fall in Indio. But Indio’s mayor, Glenn Miller, says at least one more festival in the fall is “imminent”. And although all of the announcements are exciting, it is pretty unlikely that any festivals will happen this coming fall. So for now, all festival-lovers will just have to sit and wait for their wallets to be emptied once again by yet another music festival.