Coachella to auction lifetime pass NFTs

Coachella Valley Arts & Music Festival is to auction 10 lifetime passes to the event as part of a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The ‘Coachella Keys’ collection grants admission to the 125,000-capacity festival in Indio, California every April. Each of the 10 passes will also offer a unique experience, such as the best views of the Coachella Stage, lifetime Safari camping, or a dinner prepared by a professional chef in the Rose Garden.

The auction begins on Friday, 4 February at 10am Pacific time (7pm CET) and will last for one week.

The launch includes two other NFT collections: Sights and Sounds and Desert Reflections. Sights and Sounds comprises 10 digital collectibles “made up of iconic festival photos and never heard before soundscapes from the Polo fields”. Priced $60 each, the run is limited to 10,000. Desert Reflections, meanwhile, offers one of 10 digital renditions of an iconic Coachella poster, with 1,000 available at $180.

Coachella, which has partnered with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX on the venture, says a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Give Directly, Lideres Campesinas, & Find Food Bank, while a royalty will support the creators involved. The NFTs, which can be bought, sold and traded, will be issued on Solana’s blockchain.

“Blockchain technology can give us the unique ability to offer tradable lifetime passes to Coachella”

“We’ve all seen how NFTs enable true ownership of art and media on the internet,” says Sam Schoonover, innovation lead for Coachella. “We wanted to take it one step further and use NFTs to enable ownership of experiences in the real world, too.

“Only blockchain technology can give us the unique ability to offer tradable lifetime passes to Coachella for the first time ever. We’re excited about building new utility and community for our fans with NFTs, and in FTX we found the partner that we trust to provide us with infrastructure and support to help us usher in this new frontier.”

Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and Ye (aka Kanye West) are to headline the Goldenvoice-promoted festival’s first in-person event since 2019, which will run across two weekends (15–17 and 22–24 April) at the Empire Polo Club. General sale tickets cost $449-$549, with VIP passes priced between $929 and $1,119.

Coachella is far from the first music institution to embrace the NFT boom. New York’s Governor’s Ball festival offered NFTs through a partnership with Coinbase for its 10th anniversary edition in 2021, while Live Nation announced a collaboration with artists to launch digital collectable NFT ticket stubs mirroring the unique section, row, and seat of each ticket purchased for select shows.

Last year, Dutch DJ Don Diablo sold what is thought to be the first-ever full-length concert NFT for cryptocurrency to the value of $1.2 million. The hour-long show, Destination Hexagonia, was created exclusively for the auction and sold within four minutes for 600 Ethereum (the second-largest cryptocurrency on the blockchain) on the SuperRare marketplace.

In addition, Kings of Leon generated more than $2m from a collection of non-fungible tokens the band put up for sale through blockchain technology company YellowHeart. The NFT Yourself sale included the band’s 2021 When You See Yourself album as an NFT, as well as an auction of six different ‘Golden Tickets’, which gave each successful bidder four front-row seats to one show of every Kings of Leon headlining tour for life.

The US rockers also teamed up with the Elon Musk-founded SpaceX to become the first act to send an NFT into space.

And on a related note, AEG’s Staples Center in Los Angeles was renamed the Crypto.com Arena as part of a new 20-year naming rights deal with the Singapore-based cryptocurrency platform, reportedly worth $700m.

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