State Champ Radio Coachella
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Source: Christopher Polk / Getty / Coachella 2024
The Coachella 2024 lineup is here, and it’s stacked.
The official Coachella 2024 lineup is here, and this year’s headliners will include meanie Doja Cat, hater of top rapper lists Tyler, the creator, and Lana Del Rey.
The ridiculously expensive music festival that sees music fans, rich folks, and influencers flock to the Coachella Valley will take place over two weekends, April 12 to April 14 and April 19 to April 21.
Del Rey will headline two Fridays, Tyler will bring his unique energy on Saturdays, and Doja will shut it all down on Sundays.
Coachella 2024 attendees will also see No Doubt reunite. It will mark the first time the “Spiderwebs” band has taken the stage together in almost ten years.
Other big names on the incredibly stacked lineup include Hip-Hop’s new favorite booty shaker Ice Spice, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, J Balvin, Peso Pluma, Jhené Aiko, Jon Batiste, Skepta, Grimes, Victoria Monet, Tinashe, Blxst and more.
For those who don’t have the coins to be in the desert getting their “influency” flicks off, don’t worry because YouTube will once again be the official live stream partner of the musical festival.
Fans head to the official Coachella page to catch live streams of the performances and get exclusive backstage access without worrying about desert dust getting all in their mouths and eyes.
Like it always does, the entire festival will take place at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, and ticket presale begins on January 19; good luck if you are attempting to make it out to California.
You can check out the entire Coachella 2024 lineup below.
Coachella 2024’s lineup is stacked with Latin and/or Spanish-language acts set to perform in the desert this year. Peso Pluma, who in 2023 was a surprise guest during Becky G’s set, returns to Coachella, and this time he’ll be performing his own set on April 12 and 19. The two Fridays will also feature performances […]
Coachella has the enviable reputation as a place where vintage acts put aside their differences, bands bury the hatchet, legends return to the spotlight.
Jane’s Addiction, Pixies, Pavement, Rage Against the Machine, Outkast and The Stooges all famously got the bands back together in the California desert.
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This year it’s No Doubt’s turn to keep that reputation intact.
The lineup for Coachella 2024 is suitably stacked, with Lana Del Rey, Tyler, The Creator and Doja Cat listed as headliners; and the likes of Peso Pluma, Lil Uzi Vert, Blur, Ice Spice, J Balvin, Jhené Aiko and scores more join the bill.
The big surprise is the inclusion of No Doubt, which is set for a first reunion concert in nine years.
“We’ll see you in the desert this April!!!,” reads a statement on the band’s social accounts, an announcement that’s now trending.
Earlier, Gwen Stefani, bass player Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young and guitarist Tom Dumont teased a comeback with a video posted to their socials. “Just a Girl” plays over the clip, in which Stefani reminisces about the good old days. The singer fires off a text to Kanal, and the four bandmates assemble for a Zoom call. “Do you wanna do a show?,” she asks. The answer, as we now know, is a solid yes.
Next year marks the 30th anniversary of No Doubt’s hit third album Tragic Kingdom, which featured breakout singles including “Just a Girl,” “Spiderwebs” and “Don’t Speak,” and which peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in Dec. 1996, more than a year after its release.
Last year, “Don’t Speak” entered the Billion Views Club on YouTube, marking the band’s first video — and one of less than 20 released in the 1990s — to reach that milestone. Also in 2023, No Doubt issued their 1995 sophomore LP The Beacon Street Collection on vinyl for the first time.
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2024 will play out over the two weekends of April 12-14 and 19-21. Festival passes will be available at Coachella.com starting on Friday (Jan. 19).
Click here to check out tickets for either weekend. Passes are divided into three tiers and priced at $499-$549 for general admission and $1,609 for VIP. Camping passes start at $149.
After much anticipation and as much speculation, the Coachella 2024 lineup was released Tuesday (Jan. 16). The Southern California festival will feature headliners Lana Del Rey, Tyler, The Creator and Doja Cat, with the rest of the bill featuring, as always, a strong contingent of dance/electronic acts. The dance artists getting highest billing include Justice, […]
The 2024 Coachella lineup officially arrived on Tuesday (Jan. 16), with Tyler, the Creator, Doja Cat and Lana Del Rey leading the pack as this year’s headliners.
Del Rey will take the stage on Friday (April 12 and 19), with Peso Pluma, Lil Uzi Vert, Justice, Bizarrap, Deftones, ATEEZ, Everything Always, Peggy Gou, Young Miko, Sabrina Carpenter and more also set to perform. Tyler, the Creator will then headline on Saturday (April 13 and 20), with Blur, Ice Spice, Gesaffelstein, Sublime, Jungle, Dom Dolla, Bleachers, Grimes, Jon Batiste, LE SSERAFIM and more also on the bill. Doja will round out the weekend on Sunday (April 14 and 21), alongside J Balvin, Jhené Aiko, Khruangbin, Carin León, John Summit, Lil Yachty, DJ Snake, LUDMILLA, the Rose and more.
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No Doubt is also on this year’s lineup, marking the Gwen Stefani-led group’s reunion for the first time in nine years.
Last year, Bad Bunny, BLACKPINK and Frank Ocean headlined the festival, with Ocean pulling out for weekend two and Blink-182 taking over. 2024 festival passes will be available at Coachella.com starting on Friday (Jan. 19) at 11 a.m. PT. Click here to check out tickets for either weekend. Passes are divided into three tiers and priced at $499-$549 for general admission and $1,609 for VIP. Camping passes start at $149.
A limited number of passes are available on Vivid Seats and a few other ticket sites. Enter code: BB2024 to save $20 off purchases of $200 or more at Vivid Seats.
See the full Coachella lineup via the festival’s Instagram post below.
Anyone who has attended a music festival has experienced the frustration of attempting to send and receive calls and texts amid tens of thousands of other phone-wielding fans. Messages often don’t go through, arrive an hour after being sent or show up en masse when the night is over, creating confusion and leaving meet-ups unmet.
Anyone who has attended many of the leading U.S. music festivals over the past few years has likely noticed improvements, however, with cell service approaching real-time efficiency. This isn’t a fluke, but the result of focused improvements in how service is provided both generally and at music-related mass gatherings specifically.
“Frankly, I consider phone conductivity kind of like running water these days. Venues have to have it,” says Matthew Pasco, who as vp of information for the Las Vegas Raiders oversaw construction of the distributed antenna system (DAS) at Allegiant Stadium, which has hosted major tours from Taylor Swift, Metallica, The Rolling Stones and Garth Brooks since opening in summer 2021.
That’s because while cellphones used to just be a way of connecting with (or trying to connect with) friends at shows, they’re now seen as part of the concert and festival experience, with mobile ticketing, venue apps and digital payment systems demanding fully functional coverage. Connectivity also fosters greater safety, allowing fans in need of assistance to dial out during emergencies. Social media is another important consideration, with coverage at events now expected to keep up with the ballooning data demands of TikTok, Instagram and even fans livestreaming entire shows, as has happened recently on tours by Swift and Bruce Springsteen. According to Verizon, at Governors Ball 2022, its subscribers alone used roughly 14.5 terabytes of data, which equates to one person streaming 3 million songs continually for over 10 years. So, too, do fans arrive with phones, Apple Watches and iPads — and the expectation all of them will work.
Until recently, cell coverage has been wonky at big events as the demands of smartphones collided with networks designed before devices burned through so much data. With upwards of 125,000 people squeezed into a square mile (the size of Coachella’s site), all of whom texting and posting simultaneously, carriers — primarily AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the United States — would often overload. Event organizers, who sought to solve this by providing Wi-Fi, found those networks crashed easily due to high volume.
Enter Irvine, Calif.-based tech company MatSing. Founded in 2005, the company builds antennas that, instead of reflecting signals like a traditional antenna, refracts them, creating multiple independent signals beamed in multiple directions. Instead of implementing 10 individual antennas, an event can then employ one MatSing lens antenna that creates 10 separate coverage sectors and allows multiple carriers to utilize it.
“Festivals are the hardest thing to create coverage capacity for,” says MatSing executive vp Leo Matytsine. “That was our best way of getting a foot in the door.”
The first music carrier to use MatSing’s technology at a festival was AT&T at Coachella in 2014. “People actually got connectivity that year,” says Matytsine. “After that, Verizon and T-Mobile saw what was deployed, and it started to snowball because the technology worked.” Indeed, it’s how networks function — or don’t — in high-demand settings like festivals that typically cause carriers to lose subscribers, making performance at mass gatherings crucial to customer retention.
MatSing sells its 150-plus antenna models directly to carriers, and they are now permanently installed at 32 U.S. stadiums, arenas, raceways and venues including the Hollywood Bowl, with temporary deployments at myriad Super Bowls, presidential inaugurations and festivals including South by Southwest, Austin City Limits, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Burning Man. The lattermost employs one antenna — incorporated by law enforcement as a safety measure, but which provides many attendees with service — while Coachella uses a few to cover its entire festival grounds. Prices vary depending on size and range from a couple of thousand for smaller models to tens of thousands of dollars for larger ones.
Carriers have also caught up with demand. While companies previously deployed mobile cell towers (along with MatSing tech) at mass gatherings to supplement coverage, Verizon representative Karen Schulz notes that “the network has evolved significantly over the past several years.” Improvements include fiber network expansion, carrier aggregation (which lets data flow freely across multiple spectrum bands) and U.S. deployments of high-speed 5G networks starting around 2019.
Unsurprisingly, venues themselves are now building and retrofitting to suit coverage requirements. Allegiant paid for the venue’s eight-figure DAS to maintain ownership over this asset, which the three major carriers rent out. (“I don’t want to sign away all the plumbing in my building so every time someone flushes the toilet, someone else gets paid,” says Pasco.) This DAS system also utilizes 28 MatSing antennas that hang from the roof around the ring of the stadium and service the 60,000-capacity bowl. (This option was chosen over deploying mini antennas under every seat, an option Los Angeles’ 3-year-old SoFi Stadium went with for its DAS.) At Allegiant, traditional cellular antennas have been installed in walkways, VIP suites and other areas MatSing antenna signals can’t reach. The stadium also offers Wi-Fi that has a 60% to 70% adoption rate among fans.
Some older stadiums and arenas, which are often “cement monstrosities,” says Pasco, “really struggle with deploying premium DAS systems because they don’t have the pathway to run cabling.” When such retrofits happen, they’re often “a little bit ugly,” he says.
However this coverage is implemented, its evolution is fostering increased connectedness among individuals in massive crowds, between attendees and venues themselves and with audiences well outside the confines of a show. This festival season, attendees might not even have to ask, “Hey, U there?”
When the sun goes down on the first Friday of Coachella, an electrifying energy surges from the desert field. Shaking off the heat from the sun, festival goers reignite for the day as the grounds visually light up around them. Palm trees and art pieces glow, and crowds flow from stage to stage like moths pursuing light.
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In the Gobi, a large tent lined with chandeliers, a crowd has gathered, entranced by a cube of LED screens blacked out with turquoise text that reads, “Hello… I am Whyte Fang.”
Following this introduction, the set rumbles to life, jumping from experimental bass to techno to elements of trance and drum ‘n bass. A mix of Whyte Fang originals from her recently released Genesis album make up a majority of the hour, from the wobbling “333” to the punchy “Transport God.” In a highlight moment, Brooklyn rapper Erick the Architect, one of the album’s few collaborators, joins Whyte Fang on stage for a live rendition of “SCREAM.”
A collage of visuals flirt between the futuristic and the bizarre – a swirl of swiveling robotic eyes pulse in time with the beat before transforming into a swath of glittering snakes, then butterflies, then spiders that scuttle across the screens. We see flashes of a blacklight-lit figure outlined in neon: neon embellishments glow in her hair, on her jacket, her sleeves, her pants, and most prominently, in an X on her exposed pregnant belly.
Whyte Fang never picks up the microphone to speak to the crowd, communicating only through a vocoded voice and text on the stage’s screens. Besides occasional glimpses of the neon-adorned figure at the decks, the artist is mainly represented by an illustrated head with long hair and fairy-like ears who makes several appearances throughout the show visuals. Leading up to the show, the Whyte Fang project reportedly experienced a 2,000% bump in streaming on Spotify.
While Whyte Fang may have felt the need to introduce herself at Coachella, to most, she is already well known as her alter-ego Alison Wonderland, the Australian producer who’s become a superstar of the electronic scene, playing the world’s biggest dance music festival, becoming a regular at storied venues like Colorado’s Red Rocks (where she breezily sold out two nights in a row in 2022) and scoring a pair of No. 1 LPs on Top Dance/Electronic Albums.
As Alison Wonderland, the artist born Alex Scholler also earned the title as the highest billed female DJ in Coachella’s history. Since then, she has continued to reign as a coveted headliner on festival lineups, like this month’s EDC Las Vegas, where she’s set to perform for the last time in the foreseeable future, as she is currently eight months pregnant with her first child. (The father is her longtime partner, director Ti West.)
Flash forward two weeks after Coachella, and Scholler has exchanged her neon Whyte Fang look for her more signature oversized t-shirt and sweatpants. In the comfort of her L.A. home , she sits on her couch with her fluffy black dog, Molly. Over a takeout order of veggie dumplings from Din Tai Fung (an L.A. favorite for soup dumplings and Taiwanese eats, and her latest pregnancy craving), she shares that her mom recently came to visit from Australia to see her perform at Coachella and help her prepare a room in her house for the baby, who’s set to arrive in a few weeks.
“If I drink some water, you might be able to feel some kicking,” Scholler says with a smile, chugging a gulp of water to demonstrate. At eight months pregnant, it’s a cherished moment of calm. Her past few months, however, have been anything but. Here, she shares the story of resurrecting Whyte Fang, performing while pregnant, and what the future looks like.
Whyte Fang is obviously such a fully formed concept. What is the project’s origin story?
Whyte Fang was my original production name I had been producing as before I ever released music as Alison Wonderland. I was DJing as Alison Wonderland, but the music was coming out as Whyte Fang. I really wanted to have no face. I already felt judged for how I looked and how I presented myself as Alison, and I wanted my music to be taken seriously. Whyte Fang did get some attention back in the day — it was picked up by local radio stations [in Australia] and BBC Radio 1 played me, and I was a finalist in a producer competition. Flume and I were both finalists in that competition actually, and we both lost.
Whyte Fang
Peter Don
Where did you take the project from there?
When I signed as Alison and started releasing music, I always wanted to eventually go back to Whyte Fang — but when I did, I wanted it to be executed exactly how I envisioned it. At the time, I just didn’t have the resources, and didn’t feel experienced enough as a producer to really reach what was in my head. I knew there was a vision and I could see it, but it didn’t feel like the right time.
It finally felt like the right time to shift my focus to Whyte Fang now — I’d done an EP and three albums as Alison Wonderland. I’m not really the face of Whyte Fang, and I’m not really the voice of it either. The music I make with Whyte Fang is darker and more industrial. It’s detached from my personal life. I do make beats like I do with Whyte Fang, even as Alison, but people who have interviewed me in the past have always said those songs sound so different, but it’s not really. Those types of songs just don’t shine because songs with me singing or that are more pop are the ones that shine with my Alison project. So I wanted to give those songs a proper home.
When did you begin focusing on Whyte Fang again?
I’d say it started in a more intense way after I released Loner [in 2022.] Most of the Genesis album was made within the last year.
So, while pregnant?
While pregnant, yes. A lot of the tracks were made while I was pregnant and I was feeling super creative. So many people told me I was going to lose my creativity and I was not going to feel the same, and I was really scared of that. Then as soon as I got pregnant, it felt the opposite.
I hadn’t felt the flow like that in a long time. I had just released an album that was so emotionally heavy, so it felt good to create stuff that was a bit more detached to my personal journey in terms of lyrics and working with other vocalists. I also love working with other vocalists, and I feel like this kind of project is where that makes sense for me.
With Whyte Fang, I just saw it. I knew the colors. I knew Whyte Fang was green and red. I knew what she looked like. I knew when she was performing, I didn’t want to be speaking. When I do the live show, she narrates occasionally. She has her own thing going on that’s greater than us humans, you know?
What went into the preparation for Coachella?
I worked with Tyler [Lamptrees], who does visuals for all my projects. He’s the only person I’ve ever worked with who visually sees what’s inside of my brain. It’s so rare to see something materialize like that when you’ve had such a strong vision. When we started working on the show around August 2020, we didn’t even have Coachella yet. My goal was to get Coachella so I could show people what this was on a bigger, not genre-specific scale. I was so fortunate to get it — but then when I found out I had Coachella, there wasn’t an album finished yet. I thought to myself, “This is what I want to do. I need to finish this body of work.” It was a kick up the butt to really get this album done. I look back and think, “How did I make an entire show and an album while pregnant?” But I did.
Were there any certain things or special accommodations you had to make to adjust to pregnancy through the process?
There were things I was supposed to do, that I didn’t… like rest. I think the best thing I actually did for my pregnancy was to keep living my life and letting the baby cook while living my life. I think it would’ve been a lot more intense for me if I had stopped.
I definitely don’t feel the same while pregnant. I was definitely exhausted at certain points, but I pushed through it because I had this vision that was so strong. If I really did feel like I needed a day off, I would take it, but I just knew this was something I had to finish.
After your Weekend 1 show, a statistic came out about Whyte Fang becoming the biggest-growing Spotify artist at Coachella in advance of their performance, with a 2,000% increase in streams on the service. Can you talk about that?
I never expected that! I was nervous no one would hear it. Every artist feels that, especially when you put a lot of effort and love into something. But this was the best surprise.
I still haven’t processed it properly. The fact that people are listening to an entire album in 2023 means so much to me as well, because I made this as an album. It wasn’t just meant for a single, it’s a journey. Genesis is a journey.
Performing while eight months pregnant with your belly out was such a powerful moment during the show.
I feel like a bad b–ch playing while eight months pregnant. It hasn’t been an easy road for me to become pregnant, so that in itself was a big achievement for me. I’m so proud that I got here. I never thought I would physically be able to become a mother. It’s so special for me, and I want to embrace it and be present in this moment as much as I can.
Whyte Fang
Peter Don
You shared a post recently about how early in your career, people in the industry warned you about becoming a mother and how it could affect your career.
Yeah, I was once told by someone in the music industry that I worked with that he hoped I would never become pregnant because it would ruin my career. Those words have rung so loudly in my ear, especially during these past few months.
It may have been the best thing anyone’s ever said to me, because it made me go, “well f–k you, watch this.” Being pregnant doesn’t define you, it just expands you. Literally. [Laughs.] Becoming a mother and having a family doesn’t define me. I don’t consider it a negative in any way. It’s just an add-on in my life, which is exciting and a new journey.
When I posted that on Instagram, a lot of other artists — big female artists who aren’t even in my genre — responded and said “thank you” and told me that they have also been so scared about wanting to become pregnant, thinking that it might end their career too. A lot of people I was shocked to hear from, because I didn’t even think they’d know who I was. I spoke to Grimes about it, and she was like, “Honestly, it’s punk rock.” And I agree.
You’re set to play EDC in a few weeks, which will be your last show for a while. How are you preparing?
My doctors are a little concerned about it. I’m going to be in and out for the set, and I’ll have a chair ready for me to sit on.
Everyone has been asking me if I’m sure I want to do this — and look, if I can’t because of medical reasons, I won’t fight that. I’m getting checked two days before to make sure. But I love playing music. It brings me joy, it’s not a burden. So being able to do what I love, that doesn’t feel hard to me.
Physically, it’s a lot. There will be no jumping. But again, I have an amazing team that is going to look after me, and Insomniac and EDC have always been super supportive to me and to women in general, so I know I’m in good hands. I am supposed to double in size though, so if you see a waddling bowling ball walking your way, make way.
What’s next? Maternity leave?
For Whyte Fang, I plan to tour the show and more music will come out. I’m taking a few months off and then I’ll be back for Red Rocks in October. I did have to cancel two festivals so I could take a maternity leave, but those were the only two shows I had to cancel. The festivals were incredibly understanding and obviously I look forward to making them up.
I actually found out that I was pregnant the day I played Red Rocks last year, so that will be a very poetic, full circle moment for me. I want to bring the baby to Red Rocks and be like, “This is where it all started for us!”
On April 16 at Coachella, finally, after years of postponements, and an hour late that night, Frank Ocean performed his first concert in six years, closing the country’s most-watched music festival with a set that left many fans confused and even disgruntled. Transforming the event’s main stage with a giant screen spanning nearly the full width, Ocean and his band gave the impression they were bringing fans into the recording studio — the kind in which he has presumably been working on his much-anticipated third studio album. Tinkering with remixed versions of his beloved songs, creative camera shots often directed fans’ attention away from the reclusive singer on stage and towards his image on screen.
It was not the kind of fan-friendly hit parade some had surely been hoping for, and after Ocean abruptly ended early (albeit 20 minutes past curfew), the negative reviews started flowing. Days later, he canceled his performance for the festival’s second weekend due to an ankle injury and retreated into the private life he’s built for himself away from the limelight. When he’ll come back — either onstage or with new music — is anyone’s guess.
Since the 2011 release of his debut mixtape, Nostalgia Ultra, Ocean has spent more time out of the industry than in it, releasing only two albums and performing live just 25 to 30 times in the last decade, almost exclusively at festivals. So far, that has worked out pretty well for him, creating pent-up demand that led to his booking atop last month’s Coachella, the world’s largest multi-genre festival. The last time Ocean performed in the United States was in 2017 at the Panorama festival in New York — produced by Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles-based company behind Coachella — about a year after releasing his last album, Blonde. There, Ocean ended on a high note, with New York Times reporter Jon Caramanica calling it a “a grand-scale meditation on feelings and politics” that “proved you can translate intimacy on a giant scale.”
Ahead of Ocean’s Coachella set last month, anticipation was at fever pitch. The singer had originally been booked to headline the 2020 festival before the coronavirus pandemic postponed the event for two years. Then, in 2022, it was announced that Ocean would hold off on his festival performance until 2023. All the while, fans have been waiting for a new album that still has not come, satiated only slightly by occasional features, new songs shared on his Blonded Radio show on Apple Music, miscellaneous creative and fashion projects and appearances at the Met Gala. By withholding from fans in an era where so much revolves around the “attention economy,” Ocean’s passionate fans have only become hungrier for new material from the enigmatic superstar whose long absences are viewed as a product of the singer’s meticulous pursuit of perfection.
“He’d rather do nothing than do something that’s not quite right,” Caramanica wrote in his review of Ocean’s Panorama performance. “And doing nothing has also become, in this era of blithe ubiquity, a daring and quite perversely loud kind of performance.”
If being quiet made Ocean’s stock rise, might his widely panned, self-admittedly “chaotic” comeback performance at Coachella — and his decision to pull out of the second weekend — have pushed his stock back down?
“He flopped,” said one prominent booking agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Is that a career-ender — being a fallible, over-confident 35-year-old young man with one public blemish in an otherwise brilliant career? Of course not…. After more than a decade of brilliant songwriting and performance, he is entitled to make a mistake or two.”
Whether Ocean’s Coachella set was bad or misunderstood is a point of debate, but the widely negative reception was seemingly enough to make him back out of the festival’s second weekend. For many acts, a show like this would be a major reputational hit, causing fans to second-guess attending a future festival he’s booked on — or promoters to think twice about booking him at all.
“When he releases [new] music, am I gonna give it a listen? Yes. [But] if he announces a tour date, am I going to be hesitant to go see him? … It’s a risk,” says Adrian Romo, 29, who traveled from Houston to see Ocean perform at Coachella’s second weekend. “Your fans have been waiting for however many years, you have the biggest stage in the world, and then you do that? It’s like, what can I expect from you in the future? It makes you look at it a little bit differently.”
“I’m not excited [about him] anymore. He lost a fan,” adds Romo’s boyfriend, Oren Rosenbaum, 27.
“If I am a promoter, who is considering him or a comparable artist for my festival, I’m probably going to go with the comparable artist because my trust has been shaken,” says booking agent Malachai Johns with the Allive talent agency.
Ocean’s profile has thrived out of the limelight, however, and it’s not a stretch to imagine his Coachella set driving further fan interest in what he does next, or to even witness another performance of this supposedly bad set — which was not livestreamed on the festival’s YouTube feed, as originally planned — for themselves. Streams for the singer’s music increased 94% in the days following the festival, and much to fans’ excitement he teased a brief mention of a “new album” during his performance.
“[Ocean] wasn’t planning to replicate Coachella at other festivals this summer and cash in — he doesn’t have any other concerts on his calendar for the entire year,” says a source close to the artist. As for the $4 million per set Ocean was to receive, much of that money was spent on the production of an elaborate set that was not used due to Ocean’s ankle injury. While Ocean is interested in making money, the source tells Billboard, he is not interested in going on tour and or being a festival headliner right now, noting that the Coachella performance was an effort to fulfill a commitment he made to Goldenvoice president and CEO Paul Tollett in 2020 and was never meant to serve as a launching point for a tour.
In the United States, Ocean exclusively works with Tollett and Goldenvoice for festival bookings — a relationship he’s developed in part through his friendship with rapper Tyler, the Creator. Sources say that even after all the negative attention Ocean’s Coachella set received, and the hassle of reorganizing the second weekend when he pulled out, there’s no bad blood between Ocean, his agent Brent Smith and Tollett, and they’re all open to working together again in the future.
If or when Ocean decides he wants to tour, however, he’ll assume far more liability for his shows. Unlike festivals, where fans are buying tickets to a larger event and scheduling is subject to change, canceling touring concerts usually requires refunding fans unless the show is rescheduled. The cost of trying to reschedule a tour can eat into profits and make the entire effort unsustainable if not carefully managed.
It’s also hard to determine Ocean’s drawing power, since he’s basically only performed at festivals for the last decade. His career skyrocketed soon after the release of Nostalgia Ultra, just as the U.S. festival business was taking off and many artists at the time opted to forgo the traditional touring model for the less risky festival circuit where artists are guaranteed a performance fee no matter how well tickets sold.
The downside is that artists who spent the early part of their careers performing at festivals have a challenging time building a live fan base as headliners later in their career. Ocean would certainly attract ticket buyers for a traditional venue tour, but it’s totally untested whether he could draw the kind of regular audience that would earn him $4 million a night, like his Coachella billing. Whether he wants it at all is a different question altogether.
A representative for Ocean did not respond to request for comment at time of publishing.
It’s Friday which means we’ve got some new music! Kesha dropped two new singles, SEVENTEEN’s ‘FML’ is finally here, Jack Harlow surprised everyone with a new album called ‘Jackman’, and more! Gayle credits Taylor Swift with helping her put backlash into perspective when it comes to her success or her polarizing smash hit “abcdefu.” Doechii shared some of her Florida slang with us. And more!
First-time Coachella performer Doechii caught up with Billboard News’ Tetris Kelly to discuss her historic set, a possible “mini tour” this year spanning major cities, collabing with SZA, and her upcoming album. The Tampa, Fla.-born artist is the first female rapper on the TDE roster and views the role as “a huge responsibility.”
“I know that after me, there’s going to be more female rappers that are a part of TDE,” she says. “I want to make sure that I do everything, so that the next girl feels comfortable doing everything.”
Doechii, who joins SZA on the TDE roster, was honored alongside the “Kill Bill” singer at Billboard‘s 2023 Women In Music event. “She actually gave me a shout-out that night,” Doechii recalls. “To even be peers with her, to be getting honored along with artists as big as SZA is amazing.”
Propelled into music by her mother at a young age, Doechii is trained in ballet, tap dance, jazz, contemporary dance and gymnastics, which explains the rapper’s vibrant stage presence and involvement in the creative direction of her visuals and performances.
“I’ve just always been creative and my mom gave me the freedom to be an artist ever since I was young,” she tells Billboard.
In March, Doechii released her single “What It Is (Block Boy),” sampling “Some Cut” and TLC’s “No Scrubs.” Initially released with a feature from Kodak Black, a solo version without the “Super Gremlin” rapper was released after fan backlash. The solo version is trending and has been used in more than 40,000 TikTok videos.
“When [producer J White Did It] played it for me, I was like, ‘This is the summer bop, this is exactly what I’m looking for,’” she explains. “I wanted a fun song, I wanted a hit. And that’s what we got.”
When it comes to her upcoming album, Doechii is leaning into a “genre-bending” style, specifying, “a little bit of alternative hip-hop, rock, pop, rap, it’s a lot.”
