Coachella opens today
Coachella Weekend 1 kicks off today in Indio with Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter and Karol G as the marquee headliners — a live festival running April 10–12 that’s also streaming free for home viewers. (inmusicblog.com), (ftw.usatoday.com), (goodmorningamerica.com). The weekend added a last-minute surprise when Jack White was confirmed for the bill, and organizers have published full set times so you can plan around clashes. (rttnews.com), (thefader.com).
Coachella opens Friday, April 10, in Indio, California, and the first surprise landed before the gates did: Jack White was added just days before Weekend 1 for a Saturday Mojave set after the festival posted its first set times. (coachella.com) (consequence.net) The three names driving this year’s bill are split one per night, with Sabrina Carpenter headlining Friday, Justin Bieber headlining Saturday, and Karol G closing Sunday across April 10 to April 12. (goodmorningamerica.com) (coachella.com) That schedule matters because Coachella is really two identical weekends, not one long concert, and Weekend 2 runs April 17 to April 19 at the same Empire Polo Club in the California desert. (coachella.com) (goodmorningamerica.com) If you are not in Indio, the festival is still built to be watched live from home: YouTube starts free streams at 4 p.m. Pacific time each day, with separate feeds for multiple stages and a multiview option that lets viewers watch up to four at once. (goodmorningamerica.com) (thefader.com) The set-time drop is the part fans wait for because Coachella is less like buying one ticket to one show and more like trying to solve seven overlapping concerts at once. The festival’s livestream plan reflects that, with seven concurrent streams covering different stages instead of one single broadcast. (thefader.com) (goodmorningamerica.com) Weekend 1’s early map already shows the shape of the rush: The xx are scheduled for Friday evening, The Strokes for Saturday night before Bieber, and Young Thug and Major Lazer lead into Karol G on Sunday. (thefader.com) (goodmorningamerica.com) Jack White’s add fits a Coachella habit of using one afternoon slot for a late-breaking name, and this year’s reports place him on Saturday at 3:00 p.m. on Mojave for a 45-minute set. (consequence.net) (variety.com) The other big shift is access: the festival itself is sold out, but Coachella’s official resale marketplace is still live through AXS, and the free stream means the biggest sets are no longer limited to the people who made it through the gates. (goodmorningamerica.com) (coachella.com) So the opening-day story is not just that Coachella starts on April 10. It is that one of the biggest live music weekends in the United States now begins in two places at once: on the polo fields in Indio and on a grid of YouTube windows that starts streaming before sunset. (coachella.com) (goodmorningamerica.com)
