State Champ Radio Coachella
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After months of public handwringing over slow ticket sales, the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival opens Friday (April 12) near Palm Springs with an anticipated attendance of nearly 200,000 fans over two weekends, sources tell Billboard, selling approximately 80% of the 250,000 tickets available for purchase this year.
How the shortfall will impact the festival’s bottom line is unclear, but the sources close to the festival say the dip in sales, down 14%-17% over last year, is not as bad as many had predicted. The first weekend of the festival has historically sold out of tickets in a few hours, but this year, it took nearly a month for tickets to the first weekend to sell out.
Coachella remains the most-attended and highest-grossing annual festival in North America, beating out Austin City Limits — which is also spread out over two weekends with an attendance capped at 75,000 people per weekend — and Electric Daisy Carnival at the Las Vegas Speedway, which saw attendance max out at more than 130,000 in 2022.
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Coachella is also the largest media platform in the festival space, drawing in a massive viewership thanks to its partnership with YouTube and the hundreds of media credentials it assigns to major news outlets who provide nonstop coverage. In January, Gwen Stefani’s manager Irving Azoff told Billboard that one of the reasons No Doubt decided to stage their 2024 reunion performance at Coachella was due to the attention the festival attracted globally.
But Coachella’s size and cachet doesn’t make it immune to the challenges facing much of the festival industry. A number of popular festivals set for the second quarter of 2024 — New Orleans’ JazzFest, which runs from April 25 to May 5, along with L.A.’s Beach Life festival in early May and Daytona Beach’s famed Welcome to Rockville festival May 9-12 — have not sold out of tickets, for example. Other popular events later in the year, like Governors Ball in New York (June 7-9), Electric Forest (June 20-23) and Lollapalooza (Aug 1-4), which used to sell out days after going on sale, haven’t sold out either.
There’s little agreement on why sales have slowed. Ticket brokers used to buy up thousands of tickets to flip for profit on sites like StubHub, but sales volume for events like Coachella or Lollapalooza have dropped significantly in recent years as the markup potential has dwindled away.
Booking agents from major agencies representing A-list talent have begun arguing that festivals need to create more lucrative financial incentives to attract better headliners, while many independent agents link the decline to price increases that have made tickets unaffordable.
Ticket prices for Coachella increased $50 from 2022, when three-day GA passes cost $449, to $499 in 2024, an increase of about 11%. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, three-day GA passes were priced at $429.
Booking agent JJ Cassiere, co-founder of independent booking agency 33rd and West, says festival fans are more sensitive to price increases than they have been in the past, especially younger fans who are seeing their spending power eaten away by inflation.
“I’m very concerned about the fans who are finding themselves priced out of the market,” Cassiere tells Billboard, noting that even a $20 price increase can be a make-or-break hike for some fans.
Other agents blame the dip in sales on headliner talent, arguing that the 2024 festival headliner pool — which, for Coachella, includes Lana Del Rey, Tyler the Creator, Doja Cat and No Doubt — doesn’t generate the same enthusiasm that touring artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did in 2023.
The festival’s lineup is a sign “that Coachella and nearly all other festival bookers had limited options when it came to talent,” says one booking agent who has worked with the festival for over a decade and asked to speak anonymously for this article. “The number of artists wanting to tour around festivals this year is very small.”
For much of the 2010s, festivals were able to pay headlining artists as much as 50% more than artists would make headlining their own arena tours — after all, festivals often charged more for tickets, drew much larger crowds and covered much of an artist’s production costs. That began to change in 2016 and 2017, explains agent Jared Arfa with IAG, as ticketing companies like Ticketmaster and AEG AXS began focusing on the amount of money that scalpers were making selling tickets at large markups. To help close the gap and capture that revenue for artists, Arfa says, Ticketmaster and others began using programs like dynamic pricing and platinum to strategically increase the price of higher-demand tickets — such as front-row seats — and significantly increase how much artists were making at their own concerts.
The result has been a huge increase in price, with the top 10 tours of 2023 earning an average of $5.7 million per show compared to 2017, when the top 10 tours were averaging $3.6 million per show — a 58% increase in only six years.
“The issue for every festival now is that dynamic pricing is so good and prevalent that any artist big enough to headline a festival is more motivated to just headline their own shows,” one agent tells Billboard, noting that a headlining slot at Coachella in 2024 is less of a financial decision and more about artists “who are on their way up and need to make a statement.”
“In the future,” the agent continues, “festivals need to adjust to accommodate this changing reality, by either paying headliners more or booking stronger undercards — but that’s not easy.”
While headliners are important, Peter Shapiro with Brooklyn Bowl and Day Glo Ventures says spending more on talent isn’t always a viable long-term solution and notes that the best investments festival producers can make are in their festival community and overall experience.
“People attend festivals because they enjoy an outdoor experience with other fans in a setting that feels comfortable,” Shapiro says. “That won’t change and the more organizers can invest in improving that experience, the more it will pay off in the years ahead.”
More than 100 artists and tens of thousands of music fans will flock to Coachella Valley this weekend, but there’s one person who definitely won’t be there: Machine Gun Kelly.
Just hours ahead of the 2024 festival’s kick-off on Friday (April 12), the rapper-rocker claimed on X that he he’s never been to Coachella because “they banned me in 2012 for whatever reason.”
The “My Ex’s Best Friend” singer, who is dad to 14-year-old Casie, added, “I was looking forward to finally going this year but my daughter’s volleyball tournament ended up on the same days so y’all will have to lmk how it is, she comes first.”
The post comes more than a decade after MGK, born Colson Baker, tweeted, “Coachella is a huge joke,” one week after 2012’s festival wrapped. “Its corporate as f— and they only accept the accepted but fake like they dont,” he added at the time. “Sad that music is so trendy now.”
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Billboard has reached out to Coachella for comment.
This year, Baker will miss out on a lineup led by headliners Lana Del Rey, Doja Cat and Tyler, The Creator. The two-weekend event will also feature a No Doubt reunion as well as performances from Peso Pluma, Lil Uzi Vert, Justice, Bizarrap, Sabrina Carpenter, Blur, Ice Spice, Sublime, Bleachers, Grimes, Jon Batiste, J Balvin, Jhené Aiko, Lil Yachty, DJ Snake and more.
The Cleveland-bred artist is fresh off the release of his 10-track joint EP with Trippie Redd, Genre: Sadboy. The set recently debuted at No. 30 on the Billboard 200.
See MGK’s tweets about Coachella — past and present — below.
never been to a coachella, they banned me in 2012 for whatever reason, i was looking forward to finally going this year but my daughters volleyball tournament ended up on the same days so yall will have to lmk how it is, she comes first ✌🏼— mgk (@machinegunkelly) April 12, 2024
Coachella is a huge joke. Its corporate as fuck and they only accept the accepted but fake like they dont. Sad that music is so trendy now— mgk (@machinegunkelly) April 29, 2012
Reneé Rapp knows her best qualities, and she made sure they were advertised on an eye-catching billboard on the way to Coachella, where the 24-year-old singer will be taking the stage this weekend. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “Good tits, big heart,” the billboard displays in […]
As music and media company 88rising gets set for another showcase at Coachella this weekend, founder Sean Miyashiro has only one regret: He should have told festival founder Paul Tollett to make the company’s name bigger on the lineup poster.
“I would have told him to [feature] us more prominently,” says Miyashiro, who curated a special 88rising Futures showcase for this year’s Coachella — adding that Tollett told him last year’s 88rising set “blew up the [streaming] numbers for YouTube, especially in Asia. Indonesia and The Philippines were really big — viewership form there that they have never experienced before.”
Miyashiro expects this year’s 88rising takeover will make a similarly big impression. Taking place at the Mojave stage just after 5 p.m., the label’s third consecutive Coachella set will feature performances from genre-defying quartet ATARASHII GAKKO!; male supergroup Number_i; Awich, popularly known as the queen of Japanese hip-hop Awich; and pop sensation YOASOBI. Both ATARASHII GAKKO! and YOASOBI will perform their own individual sets, though the former act tells Billboard to expect additional magic from the 88rising showcase.
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88rising Futures
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“The 88rising set is where the magic of collaboration happens!” ATARASHII GAKKO! says via email, adding that it intends to debut new tracks from its forthcoming album during the performance. “The collaborations with YOASOBI and Awich are something special that can only happen on the 88 stage. We cannot wait to show everyone the vibrant AG! energy. We hope it will be an unforgettable experience for everyone in the crowd!”
While the showcase will represent talent from several Asian countries including Japan, China and Korea, it will also feature several surprise acts from additional countries as the music company continues to act as a “bridge between East and West, West and East,” explains Miyashiro.
Sean Miyashiro
Nick Sutjongdro
“When we started, I don’t think that we tangibly knew how to [be that bridge], but, over time, there are these platforms that we’ve been able to create or partner with like Coachella [that are] really meaningful,” Miyashiro says, adding that while these artists are blowing up around the world, it can be hard to break through the noise and make their way onto the lineup of an American festival like Coachella.
“When I ask some of these artist [to come perform],” he adds, “they cry. Even their managers cry.”
For Miyashiro, developing artists and helping them break through is a major part of the company’s mission. “That is what we started the company for,” he says, “and a lot of that is coming true.”
While the 88rising set during Coachella’s first weekend is expected to be filled with special guests, the second weekend lineup will also have an element of surprise — even for Miyashiro. With some artists having to fly back home, he continues, “frankly speaking, we’re still figuring out what we’re trying to do,” he says with a laugh. “But we’re figuring it out pretty quickly.”
With the latest 88rising set at Coachella just days away, Miyashiro says he’s already looking ahead to 2025, with the company already working on developing a stage musical. “This [year] is going to be the last 88rising does something like a showcase. Next time it is going to be like a movie,” says Miyashiro. “In 2025, we’re going to need the main stage.”
When he first started his own agency, Andrew Kelsey worked out of a tiny, windowless office in San Francisco’s Mission District. He had no experience as an agent, but he did have a passion for underground electronic music and an ambition to get bookings for artists who were making it.
Twenty years later, Kelsey has a staff of 18, offices in San Francisco and Brooklyn — both of which boast natural lighting — and a roster of more than 140 house, techno and indie electronic artists whose “underground” sound has, over the last two decades, become the prevailing style of commercial electronic music in the United States.
Kelsey’s agency, the independently owned and operated Liaison Artists, now books 5,000 shows a year, including at major festivals like EDC Las Vegas, Ultra Music Festival and Coachella, where this weekend, Liaison artists Carlita, Folamour, The Blessed Madonna, Bicep, ANOTR, Eli & Fur, Ame and Innelea are all slated to play.
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“I thought it was going to be big,” Kelsey tells Billboard over Zoom, “but not this big.”
As tastes have shifted toward the style of music Liaison has always championed, the agency has grown in tandem. The company doubled in size just before the pandemic, then doubled again when live shows returned. The staff now includes eight agents, including Kelsey and his partner, Mariesa Stephens, who joined the agency in 2008 after meeting Kelsey through the Bay Area nightlife world.
Following the pandemic, veteran agents Emma Hoser and Meryl Luzzi joined the team, bringing in clients including house titan Jamie Jones, techno pioneers Adam Beyer and Nicole Moudaber and artists from the revered Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep labels. Beyond the agents, Liaison employes four accountants and several coordinators who, Kelsey says, “make the machine run.”
There was no machine to speak of when Kelsey moved to San Francisco in 1998. He arrived with one bag from his native Buffalo, N.Y., where he’d booked clubs while earning a criminal justice degree and interning at the courthouse. (“I just had a moment of like, ‘this is miserable,’” he now says of the experience. ”) In San Francisco, he found a thriving electronic music culture and knew he had to be a part of it.
But with minimal experience, there was no clear “in.” Eventually, Kelsey hustled his way into an internship at Urb Magazine, a job for which he’d “bomb the city with materials” like CDs, posters and show flyers. This led to a four-year run doing distribution at Om Records, where – after observing the label’s in-house booking agent – he decided he wanted to be an agent, too.
When his boss at Om told him no, Kelsey “quit on the spot and started an agency with no experience,” he says. He made inroads by seeking out the music he liked and persuading a few artists that, with his “absolute dedication to working hard and just making it succeed,” he could represent them. Liaison officially launched in 2004, with Kelsey signing his first big artist, Claude VonStroke, in 2006.
Around that time, Kelsey spent a summer traveling to festivals throughout Europe, then did a five-month stint in Berlin, where he was converted to the religion of techno. (He also opened a Liaison office in Berlin from 2007-2009.) The experience in Europe “just changed my life,” he says. “It was another epiphany of wanting to bring that music to the U.S.”
At that time in the United States, the house and techno scene mainly existed at warehouse parties and smaller clubs in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Then-nascent festivals like EDC Las Vegas and Ultra Music Festival in Miami were booking the genres, but Kelsey says most festival stages for this music were “1,000 capacity with no production, in the mud, on the side, just a complete afterthought. There wasn’t even any hospitality onstage, just a couple of warm beers in a dirty cooler.”
Then everything changed. The EDM boom of the early to mid-2010s brought electronic music to mainstream consciousness in the United States, where it became a major economic force. When the boom’s bombastic “mainstage” sound cooled off, it was replaced in popularity by house, techno and the many subgenres that exist under these two styles. That’s when things shifted for Liaison.
“I’d say in 2015, it really started moving,” says Kelsey. Suddenly, artists who’d previously been playing 500 capacity clubs were getting booked for much larger stages. San Diego’s CRSSD Festival launched in 2014 to service the sound, and Coachella launched its club-style Yuma Stage in 2013, with that space growing from 1,500 to 7,000 capacity over the last 11 years. Anjunadeep showcases used to max out at 500 people; now they happen at Colorado’s 10,000-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheater.
Andrew Kelsey and Mariesa Stephens
Krescent Carasso
Chicago’s ARC Music Festival, which features house and techno exclusively, launched in 2021, with longtime Liaison client Honey Dijon headlining in 2022. This weekend the artist (who won a 2023 Grammy for her work on Beyoncé’s dance-oriented Renaissance) will also play Coachella’s new Quasar Stage, which will host three to four extended dance sets.
“I remember watching the festival change, with [Coachella co-founder] Paul [Tollett] and company putting underground dance music artists on [the festival’s massive] Sahara stage, which was kind of the next organic step for this music,” says Kelsey. “I feel like all the major promoters have been in lockstep… We used to do 200 capacity shows together and all grew together with this music.”
With this growth has come revenue, and competition. In the earlier days, Stephens says a $40,000 fee for a bigger name underground artist “was often the ceiling.” These artists were usually relegated to 2,000 capacity rooms and smaller side stages at major festivals.
Now, “the entire game has changed,” Stephens continues. “Underground artists are selling out Madison Square Garden and 25,000 cap stadiums” and playing festival headlining sets for tens of thousands of people. She says “artist fees have certainly followed suit.”
Naturally, major agencies have expanded their rosters to include these formerly niche sounds.
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t deeply competitive,” Stephens says. “For many years, the majors were less of a concern for us, but there has been a major shift recently where the music Liaison has been nurturing since our inception has become wildly popular, and things did change.”
While some of Liaison’s artists “did leave in search of greener pastures,” she continues, “they were few and far between, and most of our core artists have been very loyal to us.” (With Liaison specializing in North and South America, all of its artists have different agencies in Europe and the rest of the world which Liaison works in partnership with.)
Kelsey says it’s Liaison’s authenticity and its passion for, commitment to and knowledge of this type of music that inspires artists to stay.
“Liaison embodies the perfect blend of underground authenticity and mainstream appeal,” says Dominik Ceylan, managing partner of Temporary Secretary, a German artist management group with clients, including Dixon and Ame, who are represented by Liaison in North America. “If you’re passionate about music and see your booking agency as an integral part of an ecosystem dedicated to nurturing artists and helping them thrive, Liaison is your go-to partner.”
Currently, the agency is particularly focused on developing artists’ brands, with Dixon’s Transmoderna and Bicep’s Chroma – both of which feature custom multimedia experiences — giving Liaison the chance to “bring an artist’s vision to life in a very 360-degree way,” says Stephens. As one of the few Black agents in electronic music, she’s also particularly excited about developing Francis Mercier’s Deep Root Records family of artists. “Going to parties filled with black and brown faces [is] deeply inspirational for me,” she says
Both Stephens and Kelsey agree that the market for the music they specialize in only seems to be growing, with its name at this point only used for lack of a better word.
“There’s really,” Kelsey says, “not much underground about it.”
“To tell you the truth,” says Jakob Nowell, “the songs really weren’t a huge part of my life.”
Jakob’s curls cover the top of his eyes during a mid-March Zoom chat, as he delves into the uneasy topic of his being born into rock royalty. The only son of Sublime singer Bradley Nowell was certainly aware of his late father’s legacy and the long tail of his music; growing up around San Diego and Long Beach, his mother, Troy, would play him Sublime songs on occasion, and the band’s music has long been a permanent fixture of the California rock scene.
“But if you listen to a song by a late family member, it’ll make you cry, or at least be hard to listen to,” Jakob points out, shaggy hair bouncing in place. “I definitely knew a lot of the catalog, but not to the point where folks might think. It wasn’t like, downloaded into my DNA at birth.”
Jakob was one month away from his first birthday when his father died of an accidental heroin overdose in May 1996, just as Sublime’s cult following was about to expand nationally with the ska-punk trio’s major label debut. Sublime, released in July 1996, was a posthumous smash, establishing Sublime as both ‘90s alt-rock icons and an enduring West Coast institution, on the way to selling 7 million copies to date, according to Luminate. And Jakob, a kind and passionate kid who ended up becoming a musician as well, says that his lineage was “both a blessing and a curse” as he was trying to find his own voice outside of his father’s long shadow.
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“People might assume, ‘Oh, he must be a nepotism kid who was handed everything,’” says the 28-year-old Jakob, who got his start in the rock band LAW before forming the pop-leaning psych-rock solo group Jakobs Castle. “I mean, I’ve been toiling in obscurity for 10 years and haven’t had a big break yet, so I guess it doesn’t work as good as people thought it did!”
At long last, however, Jakob has decided to try on his father’s shoes, and is about to step into a much brighter spotlight. This week, Jakob will join his dad’s old bandmates, bassist Eric Wilson and drummer Bud Gaugh, on the main stage of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, where he will lead a new incarnation of Sublime and sing his father’s biggest hits. It’s a huge home-state gig that will kick off a summer of festival performances, including Brightside Music Festival later this month and Point Break in June.
And while Coachella will mark just the second public performance featuring the younger Nowell alongside Wilson and Gaugh, if things go well, this refurbished Sublime could be playing major stages for years to come. Jakob refers to Wilson and Gaugh as the “uncles” that he would see from time to time while he was growing up; now, the combination of two of Sublime’s founding members and Bradley Nowell’s talented adult son could be a triumvirate that prolongs the band’s musical legacy.
“I never thought this would happen,” Wilson says, before adding with a laugh, “I never thought that Brad would have a son that sounds almost better than him.”
Considering the continued success of Sublime songs like “Santeria,” “What I Got,” “Badfish” and “Wrong Way” on streaming services and alternative radio more than a quarter-century after their release, a live version of the band with maximum authenticity could spell big business. Sublime’s music has been attracting sizable crowds for years, mostly through Sublime With Rome, the tribute act that long featured Wilson, at one point included Gaugh, and which is still operating today – somewhat to the consternation of the newly formed Sublime.
All three members acknowledge that seeing the word “Sublime” on the Coachella lineup, with zero asterisks or qualifiers, feels special. Ticket buyers, whether longtime fans who remember their ‘90s run or younger listeners discovering “Doin’ Time” via TikTok or Lana Del Rey’s Rock Airplay-topping 2019 cover, could feel the same way.
“This is a property that is extremely valuable,” says Joe Escalante, the longtime Vandals drummer now co-managing this version of Sublime. “Let’s make it more valuable, while the guys keep doing what they want to do.”
Still, Jakob wants to make it clear to the thousands watching him onstage with Wilson and Gaugh this summer, whether at Coachella or elsewhere: he is not Sublime, and he is not his father. “I’m so happy that something my family was part of has touched their lives, but I’m not going to be the second coming of their favorite singer,” he says. “What I’m doing is custodial work. I just want to keep the catalog alive.”
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As surprising as Sublime’s mainstream success became in the wake of Bradley Nowell’s death, it’s perhaps even more improbable that the band’s discography has transcended the 1990s alternative boom to remain commercially viable in the 2020s. After distinguishing themselves within the Long Beach scene in the early ‘90s thanks to Bradley Nowell’s laidback croon, the band’s daring storytelling and their playful-yet-edgy mix of genres, Sublime’s loyal following would turn up to their chaotic live shows and push for spins on KROQ. “The unique fusion of hip-hop, reggae, alternative and punk rock was transcendent in its time, and still is,” says Lisa Worden, senior VP of rock and alternative at iHeartMedia.
After signing to MCA Records, Sublime recorded their debut for the label in a haze of drugs in early 1996, and Nowell died in a San Francisco hotel room before the album reached record stores. As Wilson and Gaugh moved on to projects like Long Beach Dub Allstars, however, the hit singles that spun off of Sublime’s self-titled album kept enduring at alternative radio, and eventually started collecting millions of plays as the streaming era arrived. “Santeria” and “What I Got” have earned 949.3 million and 629.9 million respective U.S. on-demand streams to date, according to Luminate; “Doin’ Time” has also earned nine-figure streams (286 million), although Del Rey’s faithful cover of the song has earned even more (358 million). Meanwhile, Sublime’s songs are still sending FM listeners back to the nineties, with 74,000 total U.S. terrestrial radio plays in 2024 so far.
“A curious thing about these generational zeitgeist-defining artists is that they can be both a time machine as well as a time capsule for audiences of different generations,” says JP Alves, Spotify’s Artists & Labels Partnerships – Catalog lead. “They have an ability to reflect the spirit of their era that will forever appeal to those who lived through it, as well as entice those who didn’t. They become timeless bridges across generations, which is what I believe Sublime has ascended to.”
As the band’s music endured, Jakob Nowell wanted little to do with it. “I was always really hesitant to be involved with the Sublime stuff — I wasn’t sure if it was my place, and it’s a lot of scrutiny,” he explains.
Last year, while on tour with Jakobs Castle, he stopped by the Phoenix Theatre in Petaluma, where his father played his final show in May 1996. He saw Sublime tags on the wall, and stumbled upon a recovery meeting in one of the rooms; Jakob, who is seven years sober after battling addiction in his teen years, sat down and shared his life story with the meeting, “talking about living in a shadow and not being sure how to interface with it,” he says. Jakob thought about how he was 28 years old, the same age as his father when he passed away. A switch flipped in him that day — for the first time, he thought about picking up Bradley’s microphone. ”That moment made me think, ‘Okay, I can do this,’” Jakob says.
Meanwhile, Gaugh and Wilson had been contacted to participate in a benefit show for H.R., the leader of punk legends Bad Brains who was struggling with SUNCT (Short-lasting Unilateral Neuralgiform with Conjunctival injection and Tearing). Escalante, who had already been working with Wilson, got in touch with Jakob’s manager, the SoCal industry veteran Kevin Zinger, about the show, and a rehearsal was arranged between the surviving Sublime members and Bradley’s son, who had never played with them before.
“That first rehearsal — everybody walked in with a little bit of anxiety,” recalls Zinger, a show promoter in the ‘90s who made Sublime one of his go-to’s in San Diego. “And when they first hit the notes, you could see right away that there was an obvious connection with them all. I remember, they took a smoke break after the first hour and a half, and everybody’s looking at each other like, ‘This is really going down, and this is so cool.’”
When Sublime took the stage at the Teragram Ballroom in L.A. for the H.R. benefit show on Dec. 11, Jakob led Wilson and Gaugh through a nine-song set full of classics, ditching his shirt quickly and rolling through each guitar riff with ease. The puckish warmth in his voice resembled that of his father’s, but his delivery provided a new dimension, punctuating certain lyrics differently and breathing a youthful flair into the hits.
“They definitely got their own individualities,” says Gaugh when comparing Jakob’s performance style to his memories of Bradley. “There are some striking resemblances in terms of their mannerisms, though. Sometimes it’s f–king weird.”
Zinger says that the “phone was ringing off the hook” following the benefit show performance, with bookers sniffing out a fresh take on a proven formula. A long-standing relationship between Escalante and Goldenvoice CEO/president Paul Tollett landed Sublime on the Coachella lineup when it was announced in mid-January, with more festival dates set soon after. And while such a stage like Coachella, with such little public practice, could be seen as more daunting than a headlining show full of Sublime faithful, Escalante thinks the performance could play out like the reunited Blink-182’s set at Coachella 2023.
“Everyone there knew all the words to all of their songs, and we watched them triumph,” he says of Blink last year. “Even though people didn’t buy their tickets to see Sublime, music fans know the story, and they know the songs.”
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Part of the reason why everyone knows Sublime’s songs: another iteration of the band has been active on the road for over a decade.
In 2009, Wilson and Gaugh formed Sublime With Rome, a new outfit fronted by singer-songwriter and guitarist Rome Ramirez, which functioned as a Sublime tribute act with a loaded touring schedule and occasional studio output of original material. While Gaugh departed Sublime With Rome in 2011, Wilson was a mainstay with the group for over a decade, recording three albums with the group over the 2010s and providing the credibility of a real Sublime member in the lineup. Sublime With Rome was fairly popular outside of their shows, too: 2011’s Yours Truly scored a top 10 debut on the Billboard 200, and their original catalog registered 4.5 million U.S. streams last month, according to Luminate.
Weeks after the Coachella announcement, however, Wilson announced that he would no longer be part of Sublime With Rome, and would focus on playing with Jakob and Gaugh. “I was very much not into the SWR thing anymore — it felt like punching into a factory,” says Wilson, adding that the tribute group favored click tracks while he was in favor of a looser, jam-band atmosphere.
However, a source with knowledge of the situation says that Sublime With Rome was “blindsided” by Wilson’s departure — which came weeks before the group announced a lengthy tour that will run through the fall. Two days before Sublime takes the stage at Coachella, Sublime With Rome will kick off its own trek in Catoosa, Okla., and will likely perform several of the same songs as Sublime, in a 2,600-capacity venue.
The overlap between competing concurrent Sublime live incarnations is a situation that’s downright confusing, and which neither party seemingly wants to occur. While a rep for Sublime With Rome did not respond to a request for comment, a source confirms that Ramirez was interested in wrapping up Sublime With Rome at the end of 2025 and going forth with a solo career, following a headlining tour in 2024 and co-headlining run with another band planned for next year.
The 2024 dates were already on the books when Wilson pulled out of Sublime With Rome and united with Nowell and Gaugh – so now, those dates have been billed as a farewell tour, and the 2025 shows have been scrapped. (“If I could wave a magic wand and just turn those into Rome shows, I would,” Ramirez said in a March interview with Rolling Stone. “But the fact of the matter is, we have commitments that we’ve made to multiple people, from our fans, to the promoters, to, heck, even the legacy. We’ve made commitments, and we have to stick by them.”)
For Jakob, the situation is simple: Sublime belongs to original members Wilson and Gaugh, and they have the right to steer the band however they please. “It should be totally uncontroversial that two old friends want to play their songs with their friend’s son,” he says. As for Ramirez’s comments about Sublime with Rome’s commitment to the fans, Jakob says, “To me, that just seems like a lot of jive, a lot of sensationalism. There’s no big war, there’s no ill will that I have towards anybody. They played cover songs for a while, and put out music of their own, but Sublime With Rome was a separate entity.
Without Wilson and Gaugh involved, Jakob believes that Sublime With Rome cannot be the keepers of the flame for the original band. “They made so many people think they were Sublime,” Jakob continues. “No — Eric Wilson is Sublime, Bud Gaugh is Sublime, Bradley Nowell is Sublime. I’m not! I’m just his son, being asked to sing because I’m related to the guy. I’m not a replacement for him, no more than Rome is. If anything, you’d think he and I would have a lot more in common — talk about living in someone’s shadow your entire career. I have a big hill to try and climb over, and I’m sure that guy does, too. So if I were him, I’d be eager to move on to different pastures.”
Ultimately, Zinger says, this awkwardness will pass. Sublime With Rome will wind down over the next six months — a final album has been announced for a May 10 release, with the single “Love Is Dangerous” issued last week — and Sublime and Ramirez will continue in different trajectories.
“They wanted to do a farewell tour, and that’s what they’re doing,” Zinger says of Sublime With Rome. “Rome made his contribution to Sublime’s history, and I think this is a good way to end that chapter of their history, and start a new one.”
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Along with the Sublime With Rome weirdness, the band has also been tangled up in a battle with their former law firm, with a legal malpractice lawsuit filed by the band in February met with a countersuit alleging avoided legal bills in March. When he signed on to work with the band, Escalante says that, in general, “We spent a lot of time dealing with legal complaints, and everybody’s complaints that weren’t working with them anymore, and that is, for the most part, behind us.”
Meanwhile, coordinating schedules and touring opportunities is also a little tricky, considering Jakob’s solo touring commitments and the fact that Gaugh is a family man who lives in Reno, Nev. “When I was asked if I was interested in doing this, I was like, ‘This feels great, but first and foremost, my No. 1 title is dad,’” Gaugh, who has three children, explains. “I’m not jumping back on a tour bus anytime soon.”
So the three members have come to an understanding: any touring future will continue to consist of spot festival dates that make sense with their respective schedules, as demonstrated by their 2024 itinerary. Jakob will continue to tour and release music under the Jakobs Castle moniker, Wilson will have a looser schedule than he had when Sublime with Rome was on extended runs, and Gaugh can avoid the multi-week treks altogether. Everyone involved sounds comfortable playing Sublime’s touring plans by ear.
“As far as coming up with a 24-to-36-month strategic plan and optimizing blah blah blah, all that bulls–t is not happening,” Zinger says. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be opportunities in between tour dates: Escalante mentions a revitalized merch business for the band, as well as a biopic “that’s pretty close to being greenlit,” he says. And Wilson and Gaugh both hint at some early studio outtakes that the band could revisit and continue tinkering with for a future release — potentially with Jakob’s voice helping fill in the gaps that Bradley’s voice left behind, although nothing is finalized quite yet.
For Escalante, who remembers the Vandals palling around with Sublime decades ago, the complicating factors of the band’s current situation are justified by the fact that they’ve moved on from their drug-addled past into a relatively calm present. “I was around for the very, very beginning, and these guys were a mess 90% of the time,” he recalls. “If they were on a bill with the Vandals, I just assumed they weren’t coming.”
Now, he says, “This is nothing like that. Jakob is sober, and while Bud and Eric are not sober, as long as I’ve been involved, they haven’t been a problem, not like in the old days.” Everyone is aware of what’s at stake, Escalante says, and is on the same page as a result. “I’ve never been involved with anything where everything is working together so smoothly,” he says.
Regardless of how big this new Sublime becomes – and how much drama the band has had to endure to make it possible – Jakob is grateful for a situation he refers to as a “family reunion,” which has involved reconnecting with his musical uncles as well as his late father’s music. He wants to act like a professional, he says, and treat a show like the Coachella performance like a standard gig, but of course it’s a personal job. Through the rehearsals and preparation, Jakob has finally done the Sublime catalog deep dive, and found subtle messages from Bradley, that he believes only he could pick up.
“Whether it’s an inside joke, or recurring themes or characters, or even just the melodies, you get this beautiful tapestry,” says Jakob. “Through learning this material, it has become a way to get reacquainted with someone you never knew.”
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