How to Pick a Music Festival When They All Sound the Same

Newer competitors like Broccoli City are shaking things up in a field cluttered with imitators.
Crowd and a litup stage at Coachella
Christopher Polk

When Coachella’s 2019 lineup was announced two months ago, online reactions erred toward the Internet’s modus operandi: enthusiastically unimpressed. On Twitter, One Direction member Louis Tomlinson led a chorus of fans disappointed that there weren’t enough bands. Meanwhile, as if to argue that the festival booked too many bands, Cosmopolitan published an explainer on the festival’s headliner, Tame Impala. The lineup criticism, though, extended beyond the battle over bands. There was the usual squabbling about artists’ positions on the hierarchical poster. And as more festival bills were announced, fans aired what’s become an annual grievance. “One of the biggest complaints about festivals from fans is that every festival has the same lineup,” Coachella founder Paul Tollett told the Los Angeles Times in a January interview. “I hear that nonstop.”

Internet commenters will forever complain about anything. But the critique that Tollett described seems to be one of the few that festival bookers take seriously. Coachella notoriously uses a radius clause to prevent artists from playing within a given distance of its Indio, California location for a 100-day window surrounding the festival. (That’s reportedly why Justin Timberlake isn’t headlining this year.) And though other festivals hold less sway, many have similar policies. Each festival wants to be the only place you can catch artists like Ariana Grande, Tame Impala, and Childish Gambino over the course of one weekend. “I’m looking for 140 or 150 artists that are fresh. If you want to play a whole bunch of shows in town, I’m not mad at you. I just don’t have to put you on the [festival],” Tollett added in the interview.

The large number of music festivals and the limited crop of talent makes overlap amongst the big festivals inevitable. And yet, it’s in the aggregate that the marquee festivals tend to blur. Each emphasizes exclusivity but neglects specificity, with lineups that are curated like title-less contemporary music playlists. Governors Ball founder Tom Russell says that the New York festival aims “to make sure we have a healthy mix of a bunch of different acts so there's something for everybody.” Alicia Karlin, who has long booked talent for Michigan’s Electric Forest Festival and recently began booking for Delaware’s Firefly Festival, says she seeks “a mix of fan favorites along with current hits.”

To their credit, a broad-based strategy works for the biggest festivals. A slow year of ticket sales for Coachella meant that it sold out its first weekend in 40 minutes rather than 20. Ticket sales for Governors Ball are up 20% on the year, according to Russell. But appealing to the masses also means that so far as innovations go, the biggest festivals are more focused on experience—food and stage design, for instance—than on music. And the result, as the Coachella criticisms demonstrate, is that the Coachella model of music festival has long felt rote. Minus the rare historically great, history-minded Beyoncé performance, the major festivals are largely mass cultural rituals squeezed of cultural significance.

Beyond Coachella, Bonnaroo, and their acolytes, there is a festival that I am excited for this year: Washington, D.C.’s Broccoli City Music Festival, set to be held in late April. What differentiates the young festival—it began in Los Angeles in 2010 as Global Cooling, and moved to D.C. in 2013 as Broccoli City—is that it embodies both contemporary tastes and values.

Broccoli City’s 2019 bill, for instance, is small and carefully pruned. It’s headlined by Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino, and is rounded out with a dynamic collection of streaming-made artists on the cusp of their primes—Trippie Redd, Gunna, Lil Baby, Ella Mai, YBN Cordae, 6lack, Teyana Taylor, among them. You might find any one of these artists at another festival, but together, here, they cohere. In part, that’s because the lineup rests on hip-hop and R&B and hardly bothers with bands at all. But in that vein, the poster resembles a progression more than a hierarchy. You have two versatile veterans anchoring a collection of next-in-line talents. And with the exception of Lil Wayne, these are all new pop stars.

And outside of the music, Broccoli City is well-suited to a generation for which art and politics go hand in hand. The festival, which attracts a diverse fanbase, was started by friends Brandon McEachern and Marcus Allen as an “urban Earth Day celebration.” “We basically wanted to educate our community on living healthy without being preachy,” says McEachern. “We knew people would always come together for music. And then Marcus and I added healthy vendors, so you'll be listening to Big K.R.I.T. or Kendrick Lamar or someone but you'll be eating a banana.”

The festival charges $150 for a two-day pass, but like New York’s Global Citizen Festival, attendees can also gain admission through community service (though social media actions don’t cut it). And the music at Broccoli City is preceded by a two-day conference called BroccoliCon, which features speakers like Motown Records President Ethiopia Habtemariam and Quality Control co-founder Kevin "Coach K" Lee. “One thing that me and Marcus never felt like we had was a mentor,” says McEachern. “So we started the conference to teach folks how to get a creative job or one in education, tech, sustainability, that sort of thing. On Friday, you're learning how to fix up your resume. And then the next day you're taking shots.”

McEachern and Allen claim that the festival has been successful in its mission to educate an uplift. “We’ve begun to see that people are much more open to information about living and eating healthy, sustainability, community impact,” says Allen. McEachern adds, “The biggest reward is having young people say, 'Okay, now I feel like I can do this.' For a long time, with festivals and organized events, it was a white man's game. So it's amazing to see these young kids have the hope.”

That same notion—hope—extends to Broccoli City’s appeal more broadly. As the rare festival operating outside the standard Coachella mode, it represents possibility in an industry marred by inertia. And by the looks of things, there may well be more like it in the not-so-distant future.