Festivals are not your backdrop! - On influencers, Coachella, and the tension that returns every year
- Laureen
- May 5
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
The annual flood
Every spring, the same pattern repeats. Weekend 1 arrives, and within hours the internet fills up with festival content. Scroll through #coachella2026 and you will find hundreds of thousands of posts, a stream of carefully framed outfits, sunlit backdrops, and moments that feel spontaneous but rarely are.
What stands out is not just the scale, but the shift in focus. The music, the very reason the festival exists, often feels like it is playing a supporting role in its own story. The event begins to look less like a gathering built around sound and more like a highly efficient stage for content production.
What it feels like on the ground
That shift becomes more noticeable once you are actually there. In the middle of a set, small pockets of the crowd pause, not to listen, but to film. A “quick shot” stretches into twenty minutes as people repeat the same take, holding space while others try to move around them. Nearby, someone records a voiceover, their narration cutting through the music that everyone else came to hear. And once the footage is captured, many leave just as quickly as they arrived, moving on to the next backdrop, the next clip, the next post. None of these actions seem significant on their own, but together they reshape the atmosphere. The crowd feels less connected, more fragmented, as if everyone is present but not fully there.
From experience to performance
There was a time when festivals were defined by unpredictability. You showed up without a fixed plan, followed the sound of something interesting, and stayed because it felt right. The memory formed first, and whatever you shared afterward was simply an attempt to hold onto it. Now, for many, the process begins long before the gates open. Outfits are curated with specific visuals in mind, locations are chosen for how they will look on camera, and moments are anticipated rather than discovered. The festival becomes a backdrop, a setting that fits into a story already outlined in advance. When the experience exists primarily to be documented, it starts to lose some of its immediacy. You are no longer just part of the moment, you are also staging it. Festivals are not your backdrop! - On influencers, Coachella, and the tension that returns every year
The line that keeps getting crossed
This ongoing debate is often reduced to a simple question of posting versus not posting, but that misses the point. Sharing moments has always been part of how people engage with events like this. The real issue lies in how that sharing is approached. There is a difference between capturing what is happening and subtly reshaping the environment to produce something more polished. It shows up in small but noticeable ways, in how long someone occupies a space for a shot, in whether the music is allowed to exist without interruption, in how much awareness there is of the people around them. Festivals depend on a shared sense of presence, and that balance becomes fragile when too many people start treating the space as a personal set.
Returning to the point
None of this requires a dramatic solution. It is more about small shifts in attention. Watching a full set without reaching for a phone. Taking a photo and then stepping aside. Letting a moment unfold without trying to control how it will look afterward. These are simple choices, but they shape the overall experience in ways that are easy to underestimate. In the end, the most compelling content still comes from moments that feel genuine, the ones that were not entirely planned. Showing up for the music, for the atmosphere, for the unpredictability of it all, remains the part that cannot be replicated or staged. Everything else tends to follow from there.
