Would You Go on a Payment Plan for Coachella?
The majority of 2025 Coachella general-admission attendees used payment plans to attend, according to a recent Billboard report. Recession indicator, evidence of a mass financial-literacy problem, or both?
For the plebeians who aren’t being bankrolled by Tarte or Revolve, attending America’s biggest music festival is expensive. A three-day general admissions pass starts at a whopping $649. (For comparison, the same pass cost $429 in 2020 and $375 in 2015.) That figure does not include the cost of lodging and transportation, concessions, social-media-worthy outfits, and last-minute line-passing schemes. (Some attendees have already deemed the festival “worse than Fyre Fest” for its 12-plus-hour queues.) All of that could easily amount to several thousand dollars. So what’s a FOMO-fearing Gaga fan supposed to do?
Coachella’s payment plans are not new. Back when the festival launched the program in 2009, 18 percent of attendees used them. Now the number hovers around around 60 percent. Participants fork up a down payment of as little as $49.99 to reserve their tickets, then pay the rest off over several months. (They incur an additional $41 charge for using the service.)
The use of buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) schemes, the most popular of which are Afterpay and Klarna, skyrocketed with a surge in online shopping during the pandemic. They’re most popular among people in their 20s and 30s. In 2023, the New York Times interviewed financial experts who warned that BNPL may produce a kind of “phantom debt,” going unreported to credit bureaus and enabling reckless spending. A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report from the same year suggested that pay-later users are financially worse off than nonusers with nearly 43 percent of them overdrawing a bank account in the past year, compared with 17 percent for nonusers.
Coachella is not the only event that has implemented BNPL: Other festivals like Lollapalooza, Electric Daisy Carnival, and Rolling Loud also sell the majority of their tickets using payment-plan systems, Billboard notes. An anonymous source from Goldenvoice, which puts on Coachella, told the publication that some fans might be enrolled in four or five different festival payment plans at one time. Bleak.
What’s even bleaker is that these schemes ultimately line the pockets of people like Philip Anschutz, the Coachella CEO and conservative billionaire who has donated extensively to Republican campaigns and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations. So it was smart of Bernie Sanders to make a pit stop on his Fighting Oligarchy tour to open for Clairo at Coachella, calling on Gen-Z to “lead in the fight to combat climate change, protect women’s rights, and build an economy that works for all, not just the few.” After all, who better understands “an economy that only works for the few” than someone who went on a payment plan just to wait in line for hours to get water?
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