Why Music Festivals Fucking Suck Now

Why have music festivals gone from countercultural celebrations to overpriced, commercialized nightmares? This raw critique blames capitalism for gutting community, exposing how festivals fuck us over with insane prices, corporate sponsors, and a flattened culture. Featuring photos from Woodstock '99

People have been making music and creating culture since they’ve been living in caves. Fucking, drinking, and screwing around is a time-honored tradition across cultures and boundaries throughout the world and time. So why on Earth does it cost a metric fuckton to see a band you like live? Why is it so expensive to get food? Why is it 20 dollars for a beer? I mean, sure, it’s because of capitalism, but the commoditization of large events results in problems that deeply affect the ways we interact with culture and attempt to connect to one another.

Music festivals have a long history and take many different forms. One really interesting example of this is from the Middle Ages, literally called carnival (which is where the name comes from), in which people would celebrate and get absolutely hammered—some would even wear women’s clothes, people would gorge on food, the rich would fraternize with the poor, you name it. It wasn’t anything close to a music festival as we would know it now, but people would go apeshit during these things, and for good reason. It preceded Lent, which sucked as you typically went without eating a whole lot before Easter, which was difficult at a time where food was already scarce. The point being here is that the structure of Feudalism, while oppressive, did have to create space for the people it depended on and allow them to live and celebrate, as well as, on some level, a sense of obligation towards those they ruled. Things were still oppressive and sucked, but in ways completely different to how things suck now. Celebration and culture wasn’t completely gatekept by money, and there did exist a world where most, if not all, people could participate in events in their communities. You could be poor and celebrate; a lot of people did, and there existed a local culture and community that, while completely fucked in its own way, was supposed to help people. Community and culture now is something far harder to access if you don’t have money, because we live in a society that is atomized and worships capital.

So what do modern music festivals have to do with all this? It is a place, in theory, where community and culture could develop and flourish, and these kinds of events have always existed, but neoliberal capitalism makes it far more difficult to do this as everything gets more expensive. Take the contrast between Woodstock in the seventies and Woodstock 99, for example. In 1969, it was seven dollars for a ticket. In 1999 money, that’s about 33 dollars; today it's about 62. The difference is that your average Joe was still getting paid proportionally more money, as wealth inequality hadn’t soared to a level unseen since the French Revolution.

Another thing to note about the two Woodstocks is that the first one had zero corporate sponsors and little security. Yet it could be argued that it had, for the time, a more outsized impact on culture than Woodstock 99, which is also, funnily enough, remembered as a complete (and literal) shitshow. Both had some fucking stellar lineups though, but the experience in the 1970s was far less expensive than in 1999, which is less expensive than it is now. So what do music festivals look like today?

Coachella is one of the biggest music festivals in the country, so that should make a good example of how these festivals have changed in terms of pricing and lineups. I’ll also use Riot Fest (a Chicago festival) as a further example of how these festivals have become increasingly expensive, and to show how culture is being flattened to the same bands and lineups and corporate sponsors everywhere, even though the festival's roots are in punk rock.

So let’s start with the lineup for 2000’s Coachella. We have… Beck, Tool, and Rage Against the Machine? I was a little shocked when it popped up on Wikipedia. Nothing against Sabrina Carpenter or The Weeknd, I’m sure they’re talented artists, but it says a lot about where we were culturally and where we are now. Jeff Bezos probably wouldn’t have gotten a warm welcome 20 years ago, at least from what I’m seeing. If you want your alternative music, Chicago’s Riot Fest in 2005 had Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Agent Orange, etcetera. In 2010, you had Bad Religion, Circle Jerks (and the Bosstones). What does the lineup look like in 2025? Some good bands for certain—The Damned, Gwar, whatever—but the headliners are Blink-182, Weezer, and Green Day. I bring up Green Day because they were also the headliners at Coachella alongside Travis Scott, Post Malone, and Lady Gaga. This isn’t music criticism; none of these acts are bad, but they are mainstream and commercial, they get a ton of radio play, and it points to a kind of flattening of culture.

As music and influencer culture start to merge, you also see fewer bands and more single acts (which is a different issue altogether), and you also see the nature of these festivals change as they are forced by necessity and greed to take on corporate sponsors. Suddenly White Claw is sponsoring the punks, the normies, the anime nerds, and everybody in between. Another point about the lineups is that, as everything becomes scarcer and consolidated, this applies to music too, which is getting harder and harder to make money from, and increasingly reliant on technology, producers, ghost writers, and turned into more of a product than a sincere expression of art, which influences the vibes and what people take from events like these. Which wouldn’t be so offensive if single-day tickets were not ball-crushingly expensive, and security at these festivals won’t let you bring your own water (but narcs, undercover cops, and insane people can bring in as much pot or coke as you can handle—nothing against drugs, but you’ll see where I’m going with this in a second).

The sheer cost of going to these places is equally problematic. Coachella, to be fair, sucks, but it is one of the biggest music festivals in the world, and the headliners have usually been big names across genres. The prices, even adjusted for inflation, see the cost of tickets growing beyond reason. Ticket prices were about fifty bucks a day in 2000, during the festival’s first year. So, in 2025 money (adjusted for inflation), you would have paid 90 bucks to get in and see, like, Björk or Nine Inch Nails or Beck. In 2025, an actual ticket to Coachella costs a whopping 500 to 600 dollars per weekend, as opposed to maybe the 272 you’d be paying if ticket prices only rose because of inflation instead of the wealthy dominating the country. Riot Fest is running like, 140 bucks a day, which is also just lunacy, and you still gotta worry about where you’re gonna stay, park, sit down. Only 15 years ago, tickets were close to 27 dollars a day, and the rise in price to do things isn’t just due to inflation; companies are out for your blood, and it doesn’t matter what kinds of subcultures you’re a part of or music you like. And all of these festivals have additional stuff to sell you as well, which only adds to the transformation of concerts into shopping malls. And you can be damn sure security will be anal as fuck to increase the sale of water and food, which is all priced pretty much the same across vendors. During Coachella’s first few years, they even handed out free water; now it’s a ton of money. So costs have gone up, free shit is no longer handed out, and every festival has turned into Burning Man, more or less. Enshittification has crossed into the real. And you can bet your ass Ticketmaster is laughing their monopolistic asses to the bank if you want to go see somebody popular outside of a festival, which is hard!

The advice here is to seek out more obscure music acts, go to smaller festivals and more local stuff, and try not to go to one of these unless you absolutely have to. Also, use movie theatre logic: security is there to protect the guys selling 20-dollar beer, not you; sneak shit in if you can. As capitalism strengthens its grip, seek out the real, outside of the screens and outside the world corporations are trying to build. Culture and the opportunity to connect to others should be for all, not just the one percent.

Photos from Woodstock '99