IN 2024, COACHELLA HELPED BREAK CHAPPELL. WHO'LL BE THIS YEAR'S NEXT BIG THING?

One year ago, an emerging artist named Chappell Roan was enjoying some long-awaited buzz thanks to an opening spot on her friend Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS Tour. But despite her outsized persona, powerhouse voice and razor-sharp hooks, the then-26-year-old Amusement/Island singer-songwriter was still something of an unknown commodity. Among other things, while she'd been a major-label act since 2017, she’d never played a music festival.

Everything changed for Roan when she performed at Coachella on April 12 and 19, 2024; seven months into the life of her debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, she dazzled the few thousand onlookers in the Gobi Tent—and untold more watching on the festival’s livestream—with nine of the album's 14 songs. A week later, the eventual worldwide smash “Good Luck, Babe!” was released to DSPs. And from then on, the Chappell Roan experience was, well, hot to go.

“It's not like Chappell had 50,000 people watching her,” recalls Island Co-Chairman/CEO Justin Eshak. “The tent was full during weekend one, but it wasn’t crazy. I think a lot of people saw the livestream, which is when she talked about being your favorite artist’s favorite artist. That really traveled online. By the second weekend, there were a lot more people there. These live FOMO moments can create real springboards.”

While music (and fashion) trends have come and gone several times over since Coachella’s 1999 debut at the Empire Polo Club, the Goldenvoice-reared, Paul Tollett-overseen festival remains a crucial stop on the road to stardom for new and rediscovered artists alike. With apologies to the U.K.’s long-running Glastonbury, Coachella is still the most famous music festival in the world, drawing upward of 250,000 people over two April weekends to a sun-drenched field 20 miles east of Palm Springs.

A superlative showing there can be career-defining. Look no further than Kendrick Lamar’s boundary-pushing 2017 set, which drew one of the biggest main-stage crowds in Coachella history, or Beyoncé’s 2018 show, when she debuted the groundbreaking Homecoming extravaganza later memorialized in a Netflix film. The festival, like such coveted promotional spotlights as the Grammys telecast or Saturday Night Live, can secure an artist’s status as an undeniable, top-tier superstar or launch a new project into the stratosphere.

Future headliners like LCD Soundsystem, Muse, MGMT, Four Tet and Diplo all appeared in small print during their first appearances on the Coachella ad mat, but executives unanimously point to the event’s YouTube livestream, which premiered in 2011, as a major differentiating factor, extending the life of a performance far beyond the ephemeral.

For Roan and labelmate Sabrina Carpenter, who also had a star turn at Coachella 2024, “the livestream exploded,” says Island EVP/Head of Marketing and Business Development Jay Schumer. “People walked from the Chappell set to the Sabrina set, and she had just dropped ‘Espresso.’ It was a powerful moment for those artists.”

Carpenter debuted “Espresso” during her performance, which teased the yet-unannounced Short ’n Sweet Show tour in clever ways. “Sabrina and her team are so smart,” Eshak says. “She unveiled the color palette for the Short n’ Sweet campaign, including how she was dressed onstage, to serve almost as an end of the previous era.”

Wasserman Music SVP of Global Festivals Adam Brill credits the livestream’s glossy production values with “creating those moments for people to say, ‘That was an incredible show, and I wasn’t even there.’ He continues, "Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a movie or music video because the production and cinematography are out of control.”

Indeed, for many acts there’s a noticeable before-and-after effect when Coachella enters the mix. Pop chameleon Sia had shied away from performing for five years until she agreed to play the festival in 2016.

“The show she'd played in L.A. prior to Coachella was the [2,300-capacity] Wiltern, and after Coachella, she sold out an arena tour. That’s a pretty big leap,” says manager Jonathan Daniel of Crush Music, which also steers the career of 2025 headliner Green Day, undertaking its Coachella debut this year. “Sia had some hit records in between, but I’m not sure those would have happened the same way.”

Much to Daniel’s initial chagrin, Sia wanted to shoot a movie in advance to accompany the set, which she did with the help of actors Kristen Wiig and Paul Dano, rather than default to a standard live filming approach. “People in the audience thought those celebrities were there because they were being projected on the big screen,” Daniel says. “It was so genius, and it was a Coachella game changer.”

With her single “Messy” having recently topped the U.K. charts for three weeks and hit the Top 15 in the U.S., Island’s Lola Young is primed to spin her Coachella debut this year into a career benchmark. She’ll follow it up with appearances at major international festivals throughout the summer, including the U.K.’s Parklife and Reading and Leeds, plus Denmark’s Roskilde and Belgium’s Rock Werchter.

“After multiple U.S. tours and sold-out shows, Lola will get to say she’s had her Coachella moment,” Schumer says of the British singer, who's booked by WME’s Kirk Sommer. “The attention on her is the biggest it's ever been, and it’s right in front of new music.” Adds Eshak, “There’s a bit of magic that can happen when an artist like Lola is having a moment and people are talking about them but haven’t really seen the artist perform yet.”

In recent years Coachella’s bookings, which always included a heavy dose of international dance acts, have become even more global, helping to birth stars from K-pop (BLACKPINK in 2023) and música Mexicana (Peso Pluma in 2024) and furthering the acceptance of those genres in the U.S. marketplace. This month, BLACKPINK members JENNIE and LISA will perform highly anticipated solo sets at the festival, which serves as a perfectly timed table-setter for the foursome’s global summer stadium tour.

When polled by HITS, insiders also pointed to Tyla, Medium Build, keshi, GloRilla, Disco Lines, Djo, Chris Stussy, 2hollis, Amyl & the Sniffers and Ravyn Lenae as potential 2025 breakouts. “The level of production and investment I’m seeing from developing clients like Jessie Murph, Saint JHN and 4Batz in their sets this year has blown me away,” says CAA agent Cheryl Paglierani. “I’m excited to see the buzz they’re going to generate on the other side, but ultimately, I feel it’s an artist’s work ethic, authenticity, character and ability to bring their vision to life that differentiates who will reap the benefits of playing to the Coachella audience long after the festival is over.”

In addition to potential new chart-toppers in the mix in 2025, superstars such as Lady Gaga, Post Malone, Green Day and Charli xcx are all using Coachella to begin new cycles or amplify in-progress victory laps. Travis Scott (Cara Lewis Group/Wasserman) will change things up from his record-breaking CIRCUS MAXIMUS Tour as part of special performances dubbed "Travis Scott Designs the Desert."

For Gaga (CAA), her return to the desert after an eight-year hiatus will act as the soft launch of her upcoming MAYHEM Ball arena trek. For Malone, it will be a preview of his BIG ASS summer stadium run, set to kick off 4/29 in his adopted home of Salt Lake City.

“Playing Coachella is a great way to amplify the massive moment he's having,” says Paglierani, who books Malone, “while also providing an opportunity to play for new fans and expand his audience. Thousands of people will see him perform for the first time at Coachella, and one of the many things that makes Post such a special artist is that when you see him perform or meet him in person, he’s going to win you over.”

As one of the most popular rock bands of the past 30 years, the Cali-reared Green Day would have seemed a likely Coachella candidate for quite some time. Whatever the reason for the wait, performing in 2025 made a ton of sense for the seemingly ageless Bille Joe Armstrong-led trio, which has been ensconced in stadiums worldwide for the better part of the last year and drew raves for its most recent album, Saviors.

“This is their first performance at an event that once primarily catered to indie and alternative rock but has since evolved into a full-fledged multigenre festival,” notes the band’s agent, CAA's Jenna Adler. “This opportunity allows the band to reach an even wider and more diverse audience. The chance for a new generation to experience one of the greatest live bands is what it's all about.”

Adler, who handles Charli xcx, too, notes that in the wake of her successful SWEAT arena tour, Charli's Coachella performance “will be a celebration of BRAT, accompanied by the world’s biggest dance party," adding, "Coachella will also serve as the launchpad for her headlining tour across North America.”

Inevitably, industry chatter turns to the challenge of consistently booking A-list headliners at Coachella at a time when many acts would prefer to play multiple nights in the same sold-out arena. And though no one is close to smashing the panic button, the festival experienced a bit of a downturn in 2024, when its first weekend was outdrawn by Goldenvoice’s country festival, Stagecoach.

“Buyers need to bet on themselves and some of these artists and understand that the Chappells and the Alex Warrens are big enough to headline,” Brill opines. “We’ve always felt like it has to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam or Green Day, because they’ve done arenas and stadiums forever. We ought to understand that you can upgrade some of these younger artists to headliners at events that speak very highly to their demo.”

“We’re always looking for different tentpoles to launch something, and festivals are a great way to do that now,” Eshak says. “There was a lot of chatter about Coachella last year and whether or not it was as big as it used to be, but it was obviously really important for a lot of artists, and it will be again this year.”