Coachella now comes with a $375 Nobu omakase booked on site and served inside a Red Bull-branded pyramid, the kind of setup that makes the festival look less like a concert and more like a filmed commercial for influencer marketing. Danielle Dorsey of the Los Angeles Times documented the experience as part of this year’s festival, where the food has pushed well past the old stand of festival fries and into full-on luxury branding.
The lineup this year includes two birrierias, Dave’s Hot Chicken, Tacos 1986 and a small army of upscale burgers, a spread that says as much about the crowd as the headliners do. The whole place has become a backdrop for content creators to photograph outfits and make not-so-humblebrags within 72 hours, and that shift is exactly what Dorsey was writing against.
She had been to Coachella before, and the contrast is stark. In 2004, she describes the festival as dusty, chaotic and perfect. By 2012, expanded VIP sections and Instagram were already changing the feel. Last year, on a third visit, she says Coachella had fully tipped into functioning primarily as an influencer trade show.
That evolution shows up in the smallest details. Dorsey saw Emma Chamberlain waiting for a Sweetfin poke bowl, another reminder that the festival’s social currency now matters almost as much as the music. Even the joke attached to the event captures the split-screen mood: Coachella as “shitty heaven,” New York as “fun hell.”
The friction here is simple. Coachella still sells itself as a music festival, but its most visible growth now seems to be in brand activations, VIP access and food offerings that feel designed for photos first and appetite second. Dorsey’s account suggests the festival has moved far enough from its roots that nostalgia is no longer a side note; it is part of the critique.
For anyone trying to understand what Coachella is now, the answer is sitting inside that pyramid. The next question is whether the festival can still be recognized as a music event when so much of its energy is built for the camera.
