Beyoncé, The Weeknd and Eminem will be en route to Coachella Valley this April as headliners at the 19th annual music festival.
Each spring without fail, thousands of Newport Beach residents sojourn across the desert to don their flower crowns and cut-offs at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Today, the official line-up was announced.
The headliners are hardly surprising; Beyoncé all but promised to headline this year after canceling in 2017 due to pregnancy and Eminem and The Weeknd are both perennial mainstays on Top 40 charts as well as safe choices for crowd-pleasing main-stage acts. (Notably, Em has never performed at Coachella, though he was Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s guest in 2012.)
The one surprise, however, is in the musical genres these acts represent … and don’t represent. As Consequence of Sound noted, “For the first time in the festival’s history, a rock band will not appear at the top of the bill, another troubling sign of the genre’s waining popularity.”
Coachella is set to take place April 13-15 and April 20-22 at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, Calif. The lineup will be the same for both weekends. Advanced tickets go on sale this Friday, Jan. 5 at 11 a.m. PDT, available at coachella.com.
So what do you think, Newport Beach? Are these musical acts worth the steep ticket price to join the Coachella crowds or will you skip the desert trip this year and listen to your Coachella Spotify playlist at the beach instead?