Coachella’s reputation as a haven for hedge-fund babies and ultra-privileged influencers is nothing new, as the festival, hosted in Indio, California, has become as much of a social media spectacle as it has a music festival.
The festival, which took place just over one week ago, was a roaring success, hosting pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter and the long-awaited Justin Bieber, who appeared live for the first time in four years. However, what has really made the headlines is Coachella’s ridiculous prices, which highlights a trend in live event ticket pricing which has totally ostracised regular working people and left the festival to be, much like fellow high-society event Burning Man, overrun with delusory awakenings and drug-fuelled entitled rich kids, who myopically use the festivals as if they are in some kind of spiritual nirvana, whilst eating $20 slices of pizza.
The ticket prices alone are absurd. According to StubHub, the official ticket resale website for Coachella, weekend one tickets sold for between $4,000 to $5,000. Yes, you read that correctly, not for camping, not for food, just for the tickets to the actual event. The average household income for a two-person household in the nearby city, Anaheim, is $108,000. This means that purchasing two tickets to weekend one would cost them around 9.3% of their annual income. Some people may argue that concert tickets are a luxury and not a necessity, which is true. However, in the case of Coachella, this goes against the very fabric of which it was made.
After a 1995 dispute between the American Rock band Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster, Pearl Jam launched a campaign against Ticketmaster’s monopoly of the live events industry to cap the exorbitant increase in ticket prices. Inspired by this, Goldenvoice created Coachella as an alternative for musicians who wanted to exist outside of the grip of the iron fist of Ticketmaster and enjoy a weekend focused on music, not profits. In 2026, Coachella has become exactly what it was fighting against.
Popular TikTok creators such as ‘Jack’s Dining Room’ showed the premium prices of food at Coachella, ranging from a $20 strawberries and cream sandwich all the way to the preposterous $270 wagyu, truffle, caviar cheesesteak sandwich. Besides using every buzzword in TikTok food content, this absurd sandwich is a metaphor for what Coachella has become: a display of wealth and power for the rich, piecing together every extravagant ingredient purely for the sake of flaunting it in the rest of our faces. As prices for food, housing and warmth become almost unmanageable for regular people, the wealthy continue to do as they always have, ignore it.
