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Coachella Just Became The First Annual Music Festival To Hit $100 Million In Grosses

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For years now, Coachella has been the biggest music festival in the United States, and there is simply no doubting or disputing that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room for the gargantuan party to continue to grow!

According to Billboard, the Indio, CA-based music festival broke its record when it comes to grosses this year, bringing in an incredible $114.6 million, which now stands as the biggest sum for not just this one event, but any of its kind.

That figure makes Coachella the first annual (or at least recurring, as the media outlet points out) music festival to blow past the $100 million figure in a single year. There are other one-off events, such as last year’s Desert Trip, which have brought in more cash, but they don’t take place every year. Desert Trip, which last year took over the same grounds in California as Coachella, brought some of the biggest names to ever release music—The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who headlined the initial staging—to a massive crowd, which was willing to pay high prices to see their favorites.

Last year, Coachella just barely missed passing $100 million last year, when the event pulled in just over $94 million. The brand was able to increase its earnings so dramatically this time around thanks to an allowance from the town of Indio, CA that allowed event organizers to sell an additional 52,000 tickets, bringing the total attendance to 125,000 people per weekend. Keeping in mind that Coachella is staged over two back-to-back weekends in April, it's not too difficult to see where all that extra cash came from.

It will surely be difficult to see these already-incredible numbers continue to climb (at least in any major way, like what happened this year), but those at Goldenvoice working on the brand surely have a few ideas in mind. At this point, there is never a worry about Coachella not selling out, so it’s all about finding ways to raise prices, extract more money from attendees or, as was the case in 2017, find room for more people, which can only happen so many times.