Coachella
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Coachella season is officially upon us. After weeks of swirling rumors about who’d be filling out the 2023 lineup, the desert’s most hyped music festival on Tuesday (Jan. 10) announced its 2023 lineup.
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In addition to headliners Bad Bunny, BLACKPINK and Frank Ocean, there is of course, as always, a robust slate of dance/electronic artists on the bill. Key players include Calvin Harris, who hasn’t played Coachella since his mainstage slot back in 2014, the Coachella debut of Eric Prydz’s massively hyped (and with good reason) HOLO show, a set from Deadmau5′ TESTPILOT alter-ego, along with genre pioneers The Chemical Brothers, whose last Coachella appearance was back in 2011.
Notably, Harris’ name currently appears at the bottom of the bill, signifying that festival organizers have not yet decided on which day of the fest the Scottish superstar will play the show. Last year, Swedish House Mafia initially appeared in this area of the lineup poster as well, until the group replaced Ye as the event’s Sunday night co-headliner, along with The Weeknd.
The finer print of the Coachella 2023 bill features a crew of major dance players, including a reunion from Sasha & Digweed, Alison Wonderland’s Whyte Fang project, actor/DJ/heartthrob Idris Elba, Danish sensations WhoMadeWho and LP Giobbi.
Coachella has two stages dedicated exclusively to dance music, with the Yuma tent providing a club-style space for house and techno, while the massive Sahara Tent hosts more commercial sounds, with the genre also spread out between the festival’s other stages. The festival’s Do Lab stage also annually hosts its own three-day slate of electronic artists, with that companion lineup — which typically includes a few massive surprise sets — to drop in the coming months.
Here’s when the electronic acts are playing at this year’s festival:
Friday, April 14 & 21
The Chemical Brothers
Kaytranada
Yves Tumor
TESTPILOT
Maceo Plex
Jamie Jones
Malaa
Whyte Fang (Alison Wonderland)
Idris Elba
Vintage Culture
Dombresky
Nora En Pure
Uncle Waffles
Mochakk
Dennis Cruz
PAWSA
Oliver Koletzki
Chris Stussy
Saturday April 15 & 22
Eric Prydz Presents HOLO
Underworld
SOFI TUKKER
Chromeo
Mura Masa
Tale Of Us
Yaeji
Elderbrook
Kenny Beats
Keinemusic
Hot Since 82
Monolink
Nia Archives
Jan Blomqvist
WhoMadeWho
DJ Tennis + Carlita
Mathame
Chloé Caillet
Francis Mercier
Sunday April 16 & 23
Porter Robinson
Fisher
Chris Lake
Jai Wolf
Boris Brejcha
2manydjs
Sasha & John Digweed
Camelphat
LP Giobbi
MK
Adam Beyer
Big Wild
Romy
TSHA
Cassian
Gordo
We’re only three and a half months away from the 2023 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, which means this year’s headliners should be announced any day now.
However, before that big reveal comes, we want to know who you think should take the main stage in Indio, Calif. this April.
Frank Ocean is, obviously, the best bet for this year’s festival in the desert, considering he was originally supposed to headline the 2020 iteration along with Rage Against the Machine and Travis Scott before it was canceled by the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s also previously been announced as one of the main acts this April, so if that holds true, two other headliners will be joining him on the lineup.
Both Bad Bunny and Rihanna are also strong contenders among Billboard‘s predictions. The former capped off 2022 as the top touring act of the year, with his combined El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo & World’s Hottest Tour grossing a total of $373.5 million and selling 1.8 million tickets across 65 shows while the latter will make her triumphant return to performing just two months ahead of Coachella by headlining the Super Bowl LVII halftime show. Could Bad Bunny walk back his plan for a quiet 2023 to bring Un Verano Sin Ti to the desert? Will Rihanna double down on her hotly anticipated Super Bowl show by turning Coachella into RiRichella?
Other possibilities for headliners include Dua Lipa, SZA and Drake — the latter of whom last headlined back in 2015 before he ever had a single Hot 100 No. 1 under his belt. BLACKPINK could also make a victorious return to the Empire Polo Club in between the Asia dates of the Born Pink World Tour after making history at the festival four years ago. Even still, less likely candidates such as Olivia Rodrigo, Kate Bush or someone else entirely could serve as this year’s biggest surprise.
Vote for who you want to see headline Coachella 2023 in Billboard‘s poll below.
Although the 2023 edition of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival is still a few months away, kicking off on Apr. 14 in Indio, Calif., we should know which artists will be headed to the desert this year imminently. The Coachella lineup is typically unveiled in early-to-mid January, which means it’s just about time to submit final guesses for the artists who’ll headline this year’s edition of the three-day festival.
Which superstars will top the 2023 lineup? After Coachella boasted Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and a combo of Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd as headliners last year — their first year holding the fest this decade, after having to cancel both the 2020 and 2021 incarnations due to pandemic-related concerns — speculation for who’ll follow in their footsteps has reached a fever pitch on social media.
Some artists who have the star power of a Coachella headliner are out of the running for this year, due simply to logistics: Taylor Swift and Paramore, for instance, both have tour dates on their respective 2023 itineraries that conflict with the Coachella dates, and are thus not viewed as potential performers. And a couple of these predictions may be a little far-fetched, since some have not announced themselves as active in 2023. That’s why we’ve separated these guesses into categories, from strong possibilities to pie-in-the-sky wishes. Once the full lineup drops, we’ll see how close we came to calling our shot.
Here are our best educated guesses as to who will lead the Coachella 2023 bill:
The crypto world was rocked last week by the stunning implosion of FTX — the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange. Though the ripple effect across the industry is still playing out, Coachella appears to be caught up in the collateral damage.
The festival partnered with FTX.US to sell $1.5 million worth of NFTs back in February, a couple of months before the Southern California event’s first staging since the pandemic. The collection included 10 NFT “Coachella Keys,” which granted lifetime access to the festival and VIP perks such as luxury experiences and exclusive merchandise. Many of those NFTs now appear to be stuck and inaccessible on the defunct exchange.
“Like many of you, we have been watching this news unfold online over the past few days and are shocked by the outcome,” said a Coachella staff member on the festival’s Discord server. “We do not currently have any lines of communication with the FTX team. We have assembled an internal team to come up with solutions based on the tools we have access to. Our priority is getting Coachella NFTs off of FTX, which appears to be disabled at the moment.”
Coachella did not immediately respond to requests for further information.
FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday citing a “severe liquidity crisis,” after depositors rushed to withdraw more than $6 billion in 72 hours. It is alleged that FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried commingled customer deposits with its sister trading firm Alameda Research, resulting in a multi-billion dollar hole in the exchange’s balance sheet. When customers rushed to withdraw their funds, it became clear that FTX was insolvent.
The knock-on effects have been disastrous, with billions of dollars locked up and little prospect of recovery. Among those assets are several NFTs released through the FTX platform, including NFTs from Coachella and Tomorrowland.
One collector told Billboard he was able to withdraw his Coachella Key to his own wallet just days before FTX went bankrupt, but many others have not been so lucky. Anyone who kept their NFT on the FTX platform currently has no access to them.
Although few in the Web3 industry predicted a crisis on this scale, many crypto advocates have long argued that NFTs and cryptocurrencies should not be stored or held by centralized platforms such as FTX. The last update from the Coachella team — issued on Saturday (November 12) — advised users against interacting with any FTX product and recommended they sign out of all FTX accounts.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings, and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Major law firms cut ties with Kanye West over his antisemitic comments, Slacker fights with SoundExchange over a huge royalties judgment, Coachella sues a nearby business called “Coachillin,” and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Kanye West Is Running Out of Lawyers
After a string of antisemitic statements earlier this month, Kanye West has lost nearly every aspect of his once-formidable business empire. His representatives at CAA have dropped him, and his signature fashion partnerships with Adidas, The Gap and Balenciaga have all been terminated.You can now add his lawyers to that list.Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, the prestigious Wall Street firm that represented Kanye in his dealings with Gap, confirmed to multiple outlets last week that the firm is not currently representing him and “have made the decision not to work with him in the future.”Greenberg Traurig, a top music firm that’s repping him in both a copyright lawsuit and an employment case, said it was taking steps to withdraw from those cases as fast as ethically possible: “This firm was founded by individuals who faced discrimination and many of us lost ancestors because of that kind of hate and prejudice,” the firm wrote in a statement, referring to Jewish founders Larry Hoffman, Mel Greenberg and Robert Traurig.Robert Cohen of Cohen Clair Lans Greifer Thorpe & Rottenstreich, the rapper’s sixth divorce attorney in his split with Kim Kardashian who he only just hired in September, has also dropped him, according to a report from Reuters. And Brown Rudnick partner Camille Vasquez, who rose to prominence representing Johnny Depp in his defamation case against Amber Heard, quit just days after being hired by the embattled rapper, as first reported by the New York Post.It seems even prospective lawyers are distancing themselves. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Alex Spiro, a Billboard Top Music Lawyer who reps Jay-Z and Elon Musk, told Reuters that Ye “asked me to be his attorney but the representation never formalized.” Spiro made it clear: “I do not represent Mr. West.”A lack of options for legal representation isn’t a great situation for West, because he has no shortage of legal problems.Even if he avoids any court battles over his various corporate breakups — and that’s far from certain, given the messy web of intellectual property he splits with Adidas and other former partners — he’s still got plenty of litigation ahead, including looming December deadlines in the divorce case; multiple copyright lawsuits over claims of illegal sampling; a case claiming he stiffed a production company that worked on his Sunday Service; a lawsuit claiming he refused to return clothes to a high-end fashion rental service; a case claiming he owes $4.5 million to a celebrity accountant he abruptly fired; and threats of lawsuits from the family of George Floyd over his incendiary statements about Floyd’s killing.
Other top stories this week…
SLACKER’S ROYALTY WOES – Slacker warned a judge that a recent ruling, requiring the streamer to hand over nearly $10 million in unpaid royalties to SoundExchange, would cause “economic damage” for the company that would be “unsustainable.” But SoundExchange quickly fired back that it had spent years “indulging” such excuses and that labels and artists had waited “long enough” to get paid by the streamer: “The court should deny defendants’ latest attempt to shirk their obligations with the promise that next time will be different.”COACHELLA v. ‘COACHILLIN’ – AEG’s Goldenvoice, the owner of Coachella, filed a trademark infringement lawsuit over a planned “Coachillin” business park located just a few miles north of the festival grounds at the Empire Polo Club. The suit said the 160-acre development plan, aimed at cannabis businesses, isn’t a problem — but needs to pick a new name: “The public has come to associate the phrase ‘Coachillin’ to refer to the Coachella Festival and plaintiffs, not merely to refer to the Coachella Valley — and certainly not Coachillin Holdings.” The case is the latest in a string of trademark cases from Goldenvoice, which sued Ticketmaster last year over a New Year’s Eve concert called “Coachella Day One 22″ and sued a West African company last month over an event called “Afrochella.”COMEDY CARTEL? JUDGE SAYS NO – A federal judge rejected one of Pandora’s key arguments in its legal battle with comedians, dismissing claims that a licensing group called Word Collections was operating as an illegal comedy “cartel” that violated federal antitrust laws. The ruling came in sprawling litigation filed by a slew of comics who want Pandora to start paying the equivalent of publishing royalties for spoken-word content. Faced with those allegations, the streamer responded by arguing that Word Collections and the comedians were effectively trying to create a “monopolistic portfolio” of comedy rights, aimed at “dramatically increasing” the prices streamers must pay. But in the ruling this week, the judge didn’t buy it — saying Pandora didn’t properly allege that the comics had conspired to fix prices, nor that their grouping amounted to an illegal monopoly in the comedy world.BAIL REVOKED FOR TORY LANEZ – A Los Angeles judge ordered Tory Lanezto be placed under house arrest ahead of a trial over accusations that he shot Megan Thee Stallion, citing an incident last month in which the singer allegedly assaulted singer August Alsina in Chicago. The singer is facing more than 22 years in prison over the alleged July 2020 altercation with Stallion, in which he allegedly shot her in the foot during an argument following a party in the Hollywood Hills. The trial is set to kick off at the end of November and the singer had been out on bail, but in September Alsina claimed that Lanez and his entourage attacked him following a Chicago concert. Prosecutors at the time said they were investigating those claims, and Judge David Herriford cited the accusations to revoke Lanez’ bail this week.