ROSTR PRESENTS

Who Booked Coachella? 2020

How the Coachella '23 lineup shakes out by the talent agencies that booked the artists plus analysis of gender, genre, record labels & more of the artists on the lineup.

Lineup Share By Agency

⭐️ Paradigm have by far the largest share, representing 1 in 3 artists on the lineup.

⭐️ WME (16%) & CAA (13%) are next up. However, even added together their share doesn’t match Paradigm’s).

⭐️ UTA come in 4th with 9% of the lineup.

⭐️ Outside of the majors, SF based independents Liaison Artists have the highest share with 5%.

⭐️ Just 4 agencies - Paradigm, WME, CAA & UTA represent almost 75% of the lineup.

Who booked the top 2 rows?

⭐️ WME won the battle of the headliners booking 2 of 3 headline spots (Rage Against The Machine & Frank Ocean).

⭐️ Cara Lewis Group takes the other headliner spot (Travis Scott).

⭐️ Paradigm lead the pack with 6 artists across the top-two rows.

Poster Positioning

The chart shows the distribution of an agency’s artists down the lineup. We’ve broken it down by: Headliners (top row on the poster), Sub-Headliners (2nd row), 3rd Row & 4th Row+ (Undercard).


⭐️ Paradigm have by far the largest share, representing 1 in 3 artists on the lineup.

⭐️ WME (16%) & CAA (13%) are next up. However, even added together their share doesn’t match Paradigm’s).

⭐️ UTA come in 4th with 9% of the lineup.

⭐️ Outside of the majors, SF based independents Liaison Artists have the highest share with 5%.

⭐️ Just 4 agencies - Paradigm, WME, CAA & UTA represent almost 75% of the lineup.

Analysis

⭐️ Paradigm: according to data on ROSTR, Paradigm have ~2.8K artists on their roster (~1K more than the next largest agency). This scale has no doubt contributed to their dominance this year, but their presence throughout the lineup (including leading the top rows) suggests their dominance this year is down much more than scale & sets them up nicely for the next few years.


⭐️ WME & CAA: the traditional agency power-houses may have fewer artists than Paradigm on their rosters (& the lineup) but the artists they do have are packing bigger punches with a significantly higher proportion of their artists filling the top slots on the lineup vs the undercard. This could reflect a focus on more premium artists AND/OR reflects a trend for superstar artists to move to one of the “big guys” once they’re already established.


⭐️ In our recent report on The World’s Leading Artist Management Companies we noted the amount of fragmentation in the MGMT ecosystem relative to the label world. The opposite may be true when it comes to mainstream market share in the agency world with just 4 companies, whose rosters run in the thousands of artists, dominating the landscape. We count just 21 agencies in total represented on the lineup, with only 11 agencies landing more than 1 artist on this year’s lineup.


🕒 We’ll run this report again for more festivals in 2020, as well as for next year’s Coachella lineup so we can track trends over time.

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