For the past two decades, country fans locally and from across the West have packed their RVs and headed to Indio for the Stagecoach country music festival — an event that was once the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival's relatively intimate little cousin, but is now attended by nearly 80,000 revelers yearly.
The latest edition of Stagecoach is scheduled for Friday-Sunday on six stages spread over 1,000 acres at the Empire Polo Club.
"The power of the work of Nashville's songwriting community inspires my booking and curatorial choices," said Stacy Vee, Goldenvoice's vice president and Stagecoach booker. She's been employed by the organization for two decades. Thus, she's been with Stagecoach since its 2007 founding.
"Nashville's culture and songs have permeated county music's community and inspired much of its current growth," she said. "Those songs still exist at the heart of what we're doing (at Stagecoach) and at the heart of country music overall."
This year's Stagecoach occurs at a fascinating crossroads for the event — and an even more fascinating one when contemplating how similar an ever-more-cosmopolitan and lucrative Nashville has become as related to Stagecoach as an event.
Pop superstars now in Stagecoach's orbit
Pop culture and pop music's more prominent stars and broader influences are arriving in country music.
Thus, something more significant than the power of the song is the power of superstar personalities fueled by massive revenues and audiences and an expanded spotlight works to amplify country's deep — and, in Stagecoach's case, well-curated — culture.
This year could be the first that Nashville's work springboards from Indio's stages to create dynamic pop superstars who redefine the potential of American commerce and culture.
One of those superstars crossing into country is Post Malone, who will perform at the festival's "Mane Stage" on Saturday night.
Vee describes Malone as an ideal pop superstar with clear country roots. His ability to ease into Stagecoach's culture highlights how he could be a bellwether for how Americans overall embrace the genre.
Regarding Coachella icon Beyoncé's current moment in country music, Vee highlights that "Act II: Cowboy Carter" collaborators Malone and Willie Nelson will be joined on 2024's lineup by Tanner Adell, Willie Jones and Brittney Spencer. In previous years, other album collaborators, like Rhiannon Giddens, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy have appeared at the event.
"Without trying, our festival bookings are aligned with Beyoncé's listening habits," Vee said. "That's a pretty great thing."
Nashville's growing (and lucrative) national impact
By 2025, Stagecoach's three 2024 headliners — Eric Church, Miranda Lambert and Morgan Wallen — will also have their names plastered on honky-tonk's on downtown's Lower Broadway. Nashville has recently seen Garth Brooks spend $50 million to purchase and renovate a six-story honky-tonk, and the Country Music Association's 2023 fan festival and the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp.'s July Fourth celebration, saw consumers spend $86.3 million in the area.
Add $38 million that Nashville's country-focused New Year's Eve Big Bash at nearby Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park earned in 2023 and that revenue total jumps to $124 million.
Comparatively, according to previous reporting by The Desert Sun, the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals in 2022 saw spending by consumers in Indio alone reach $106 million.
Nashville's nearly 33% jump in mega-event spending power in the past decade — alongside country music's surge, which has seen acts like Jason Aldean, Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen become all-genre chart-toppers — creates a space for dynamic evolution.
Country music's always-burgeoning festival circuit has many stages. However, taking a lucrative set of stars, joined by the era's biggest superstars, to legendary stages shared by Coachella presents a different set of possibilities.
Dance, Diplo and Stagecoach's evolution
"Country music and its festivals are leaning more towards pop music in many respects," Vee said. "People of all ages, cultures, musical preferences, and walks of life are trying country music."
Musical discovery during the streaming era's growth in pop and country music will benefit how this pop evolution will entrench itself as country music expands into an broadened festival marketplace, she said.
"(The act of) musical consumption is maintaining excitement (in the genre)," Vee adds.
Since 2019, Stagecoach has blended the growth of its parent company, Anschutz Entertainment Group, to book acts like electronic dance music kingpin Diplo. In general, performers like him are growing as the boldest arbiters of crossing genres, alongside consumers of all ages discovering music via streaming platforms.
For 2024's Stagecoach, Diplo expanded on the first two successful releases under his Western-themed Thomas Wesley persona with a mixtape featuring a pulsing, house music-aimed reworking of the Outfield's four-decade-old rock classic "Your Love" and a refreshed, dance-ready take on Bailey Zimmerman's double-platinum-selling country chart-topper "Religiously."
"Authenticity, genuine fandom and respect for the artists and culture — that's why Diplo works so well in country music," Vee said.
She was initially reticent about combining Diplo's work since 2005 in the Goldenvoice universe at Coachella with what happens at Stagecoach.
Coachella has comfortably evolved from a Pearl Jam concert to a space where everything from Daft Punk, 2Pac in holographic form, a Beyoncé Netflix special-as-performance and the wildest industry expectation-shifting moments have occurred.
However, Stagecoach was still a place where the country's biggest mainstream names shared a heavily curated space with an assortment of classic favorites, including 2024 festival participants Clint Black, the Beach Boys, Pam Tillis and Dwight Yoakam, plus critically acclaimed indie-beloved artists like Wyatt Flores, Charles Wesley Godwin, Zach Top and Jake Worthington.
It's also a festival where Vee, who said that watching Americana-beloved traditionalist Sturgill Simpson perform at Los Angeles' Troubadour in 2014 was a key moment in her embrace of modern country's possibilities and potential popularity, is amplifying country music's growth while simultaneously fervently protecting its roots.
On the surface, giving a DJ known for blending Dutch house music with dancehall and queer-friendly club music with festival-style electro the space to work at Stagecoach is provocatively fun. However, it also has the potential to go too far. However, that has yet to occur.
"Diplo's talent at viewing artists and sounds that pique people's interests through both a pop and traditional country lens has offered a space for country music-loving, creative and forward-thinking people to be open to doing new things with a new energy and perspective in different (but sustainable) ways."
Guy Fieri's superstar template
Country music's ability to create superstars within its culture is an industry.
However, via an unlikely personality — celebrity chef Guy Fieri — the potential emerges for country music stars to now have an avatar whose yearly presence at Stagecoach creates a standard based on separate traditions at which to aim their already famous personas.
Century-old archetypes, stereotypes baked into the fabric of America's roots and traditions, are already lucrative, with a potential value of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Country music has always paired well with personality-driven and variety-show-style entertainment.
Fieri, a Food Network star whom The New York Times calls an Emmy award-winning emissary of "rowdy, mass-market culture," is preparing for the sixth edition of his Smokehouse Cooking Demo at Stagecoach. The stage will feature Jelly Roll, Paul Cauthen, Clink Black, Diplo, HARDY and Bailey Zimmerman.
Pairing with Fieri could virally explode their already growing fandoms.
"Guy is the Stagecoach Festival's biggest fan," Vee said.
He's a lifelong, California-raised country music fan whose parents owned a Western outfitter store and raised him on the music of Bakersfield icons like Merle Haggard, plus a mix of Nashville and Texas pop favorites and outlaws like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Conway Twitty.
"Guy has a heartfelt love of grilling, music and hearing the fans' and artists' stories — he also drives around with free tacos to our first responder, medical, security and staff encampments," Vee said.
She believes that the passion of the artists and fans of the genre exhibited at Stagecoach pulls that level of emotion out of superstars like Fieri.
"When someone (of his stature) is all heart, cares about people and has that rock star energy, it makes being (approachable) into something so much greater."
Discovering what's next
Vee is keen to remove the limitations of Stagecoach's perception at a festival Goldenvoice hosts just five days after Coachella ends.
She mentions expanding dance superstars booked at 2024's event, including frequent Diplo collaborator Dillon Francis and Regional Mexican musician Carín León, or highlighting acts like Texans Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett or Post Malone and Willie Nelson in back-to-back sets as defined by an "uncharted" future that serves as a gateway for an unprecedented expansion of the culture and music Nashville (and pop's expanding mainstream) is lucratively incubating.
"Country's culture and music allow a diverse group of people who have many thoughts about many things to sing the same songs together without a care in the world," she said. "In general, music has the ability to create (a continuum) of moments where people from different backgrounds can share being on the same page. People having that experience (at Stagecoach) and then taking that energy and the artists behind those moments back to their communities elsewhere is essential to discovering (what's next)."
Marcus Dowling is the Nashville Country Music Reporter for The Tennessean (part of the USA Today Network).
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