
Music festivals are the corporate dystopia we deserve - thirduncle
https://theoutline.com/post/4215/music-festivals-dystopia-coachella
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Ancalagon
The article mostly references Coachella, a very popular festival thats been
around for a while. It fails to mention the many smaller festivals happening
all the time, with far less noteriety or corporate sponsorship. Of course
Coachella sold out, almost everyone in any industry will once enough money
becomes involved. But to apply a blanket statement that modern music festivals
are dystopian corporate propaganda machines is just plain wrong.

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greatquux
Exactly. Phish's festivals (which were a big inspiration for the people who
started Bonnaroo and probably Coachella too) do not resemble the description
in this article at all. Plus there are a lot of smaller festivals going on all
over. So who's surprised that a big corporate festival is corporatized?

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jtmcmc
This just seems to be anti-coachella but with a clickbait headline. Sure
coachella is super corporate not really surprising. As the article itself
mentions there are numerous other festivals happening throughout the country
that are community focused, that are collaborative, that are not focused on
consumption, etc... etc...

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ux4
I do wish we had the wild and free festivals they had in the 70s and 80s, but
that's pretty much impossible now with all the regulations for legal festivals
and the fact that organizers are legally responsible for any accidents that
happen. An example of this is EDC Los Angeles 2010 where a 15 year old girl
died (after sneaking into the festival and taking pills of ecstasy):

[http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/30/local/la-me-rave-
dea...](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/30/local/la-me-rave-
death-20100630)

Lawyers made a case of negligence against the organizers, they had a lengthy
trial, the organizers settled with the parents outside of court, and the
festival was never held in Los Angeles again. As a result of this tragedy and
similar events, tight security is introduced, rules are put into place, and we
get sterilized events in an attempt to tame the beast. But where do we draw
the line?

Reading this article felt like the typical Coachella-hate circlejerk because
it was more about Coachella than any other music festival, but a good point
they brought up was the RFID chips on wristbands that allow them to track your
location 24/7\. Sure it helps with logistics, but it also lets them track you
back to your hotel, where you ate for breakfast, what vendor booths you
visited, who you were with, etc. This in combination with the required
Coachella phone app would allow them to accrue a pretty large amount of
personal data.

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mullen
> after sneaking into the festival

She did not sneak in, EDC did not check ID's and let her in.

~~~
Symbiote
That isn't so significant, the minimum age for the festival was 16 years.

Some European countries (primarily the Netherlands, some others) have "pill
testing" where people can check their ecstasy is real. Ecstasy itself is
fairly safe, it's when it's not actually ecstasy that it can be dangerous. A
culture of harsh punishment for minor drug use is deadly: people won't seek
help when something is wrong. In countries where teenagers aren't going to
fear jail time, the affected person's friends are likely to seek medical
attention sooner than in the USA.

