The first Coachella Music and Arts Festival was a two-day event held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California on October 9-10, 1999. Single day tickets were $50, attendance was roughly 20,000 a day, and the festival failed to make money.

In 2011 the Coachella Music & Arts Festival became a three-day event held on two consecutive weekends with tickets for each weekend sold separately. In recent years, attendance at the festival averages roughly 125,00 per day and festival goers spend many hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the Coachella Valley.

One of the most popular art installations ever to have appeared at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival was “Escape Velocity”, also known as the Coachella Astronaut.  This 36’ tall x 57’long x 40’wide kinetic sculpture with radio-controlled animatronics appeared at the festival in 2014 where it moved throughout the grounds interacting with festival goers.  The five-story tall Coachella Astronaut found a home at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, Minnesota where it will remain indefinitely.