Coachella 2026: A global stage for music, art and media

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has evolved into a multidisciplinary platform that brings together global music acts, large-scale art installations and artist collectives, shaping trends across music and visual arts sectors.

The festival's lineup highlighted that scope. In addition to headline performances by Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G, the acts reflected the festival's roots in electronic music, rock and hip-hop, alongside a continued rise of Spanish-language, Latin American and K-pop artists, underscoring the festival's increasingly global reach.

Coachella also continues to function as a prominent digital event. Its official livestream, launched on YouTube in 2011, draws a worldwide audience and is among the platform's largest annual live music offerings, extending the festival's impact far beyond its Indio, California, location, the Empire Polo Grounds. Weekend 2 will be on view starting Friday at 4 p.m. PT.

Coachella effectively kicks off U.S. festival season. Later this month, Coachella sister festival Stagecoach, which celebrates country music, also returns to the Empire Polo Grounds.

To discuss festival trends and their implications for music, media and culture, UCLA has experts available for comment.

Making big art for the desert

Benjamin Freyinger
Benjamin Freyinger is a lecturer in UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design, as well as an alum (M.Arch. '05). This year's Coachella festival features "Visage Brut," a large-scale installation by Freyinger and Andrew Holder (M.A. '05). Freyinger and Holder are co-principals and co-founders of the architecture firm Los Angeles Design Group. Reimagining the logic and mythology of a totem pole through contemporary construction, "Visage Brut" takes the form of a soaring steel tower composed of modular boxes - each folded, rolled, cut or warped just short of structural failure. The result is a vertical procession of hybrid geometries that both bear physical weight and project an uncanny, almost figurative presence.

"Born from an experimental collaboration with software-assisted steel fabricator Stud-IO Construction, the installation transforms an industrial material used in retail construction into an expressive form. Encountered as both landmark and invitation, 'Visage Brut' offers shaded niches, intricate surfaces, and a layered legibility that encourages festivalgoers to slow down and look closely. The piece looks back at the audience so that encountering the piece is meeting another festival goer or perhaps even akin to meeting an old friend in the desert."

Contact: Sean Arenas [email protected]

Travis Dagenais: [email protected]

► Large-scale installation by UCLA Arts alumni invites Coachella festivalgoers to slow down and look closely

Women remain underrepresented on the festival world's biggest stages

Tiffany Naiman
Tiffany Naiman is the director of music industry programs and an assistant teaching professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, as well as a lecturer in the department of musicology, who has brought in artists such as Kaskade to her classes to talk about industry and artistic practice. She is a scholar of women, aging and disability in popular music, as well as on David Bowie. With expertise in other areas such as experimental film and music, electronic dance music (EDM) and popular music, she also curates and produces music documentaries, experimental films, music videos and LGBTQ+ films.

She can comment on EDM in general, how Coachella has evolved over the years and how its success has influenced other festivals. This year at Coachella, Karol G made history and headlines in an ambitious performance that marked the first time a Latina headlined the festival since its 1999 inception. Beyoncé was the first Black woman to headline the festival in 2018, and that same year, EDM producer Rezz was the first female artist to close out the Sahara stage.

"I found the women on this year's Coachella lineup to be the most artistically compelling contributors, particularly Little Simz, FKA Twigs, Rezz and Laufey, each of whom demonstrates a distinct and sophisticated command of their identities, performative narratives and mastery of their own sound. However, these standout moments exist alongside a persistent structural imbalance: only 35% of the lineup features women. More concerning is that this figure is inclusive of any act with at least one female member, even when she is the sole woman in an otherwise male group, which significantly overstates meaningful representation."

Email: [email protected]

What makes music popular

Greg Bryant
Professor and chair in the department of communication, Bryant studies communication and cognition from an evolutionary perspective. His research incorporates concepts and methods from cognitive psychology, speech science, anthropology and behavioral biology. His paper, "The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal)," examines how the growing popularity of distortion signals an acceleration of musical evolution and cultural innovation. He can comment on why certain acts have gained popularity, or what features of musical acts like Justin Bieber might make them popular and more appealing.

Email: [email protected]

Youth culture, authenticity and community

Yalda Uhls
Founder and CEO of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA and an expert on youth culture, Uhls' research focuses on how various media affect the social and emotional well-being of young people and how adolescents seek authenticity in the media they consume. The center's latest "Teens & Screens" study shows that teens long for friendship and community, with concerts one of the top places they like to come together and platforms like YouTube a top spot to find authenticity.

Email: [email protected]

Gender and pop music

Juliet Williams
Juliet Williams is a professor of gender studies and an expert in feminist theory, the cultural politics of privacy, masculinity studies and feminist cultural studies. Williams can comment on gender and popular music.

Email: [email protected]