Every year when music festival lineups drop the same question comes up: why these artists? Some headliners feel obvious while others feel like a stretch, and the logic behind those choices isn’t always clear. Part of that uncertainty comes from the fact that major festivals do not have the same genre based origins; Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and Coachella each started with a distinct identity tied to a specific music scene. Lollapalooza, founded in 1991, initially came from the alternative rock movement as it toured with lineups centered on rock and grunge artists. Bonnaroo, which began in 2002 in Tennessee, was rooted in folk, jam bands, and roots music which emphasizes live performance and a more communal atmosphere. Coachella, launched in 1999 in the California desert, started around mainly indie and electronic music, combining emerging artists with a more image-focused, curated experience.

These origins shaped what it meant to headline each festival in their early years. But as these events have grown, their lineups have expanded to cover similar genres and artists, making the selection process seem less tied to their original identities. This raises the broader question of what actually determines a headliner of a music festival now, and how do those original festival identities still matter?

Lollapalooza, created in 1991 as a farewell tour for the band Jane’s Addiction, was intended to be a one-time celebration of rock. Its success led it to become a repeat touring show, but its origins stayed reflected in the overwhelming majority of rock artists throughout the early to mid ‘90s, with bits of hip-hop and electronic music occasionally making appearances. In the 2000s, rock began to fracture out, spiking down gradually as indie artists took the stage. By 2010, Lollapalooza could no longer be considered a rock festival: hip-hop, indie, and pop grew into large enough proportions that rock was eliminated entirely in 2014. From then until today, spikes in music trends show preferences for hip-hop, then pop, into the most recent headliners even featuring K-pop and country artists. Digging into Lollapalooza’s history, it becomes apparent that the festival has shifted their signature identity to represent flexibility, defying genre limitations to become a permanent staple in music culture.

Coachella began in 1999 and like many festivals at the time, was closely tied to alternative and rock music. In its early years, most headliners came from rock and electronic backgrounds, reflecting the festival’s roots in those scenes. However over the 2000s, the lineup started to diversify as hip-hop artists became more prominent along with electronic. By the mid-2010s, the festival’s headliners reflected a much broader range of genres, with pop and hip-hop taking on larger roles alongside indie acts. In more recent years, the lineup has continued to expand with the addition of globally popular genres such as Latin music and K-pop. The shift over time shows how Coachella has moved away from a primarily rock and electronic-focused identity and toward a festival that reflects changing mainstream music trends.

Bonnaroo was created in 2002, and its original identity centered around jam, roots, and folk music. Folk music has had a pretty consistent presence throughout the years (categorized as indie on the chart), but the amount of jam and roots has declined over the years. Over two decades, the presence of rock has also remained steady, peaking in the late 2000s. Hip-hop and electronic music were not part of the musical identity of Bonnaroo back in the 2000s, but have ascended to a steady presence over time. In comparison to Lollapalooza or Coachella, the distribution of types of music does not change as much by year (there is a lack of zigzags). However, in general, all three festivals seem to have a dominant rock, hip-hop, and electronic presence, with Bonnaroo having slightly more indie and jam music and less R&B.

Historically, major music festivals were filled with strong and distinct musical identities. For example, Lollapalooza emerged from alternative rock, Coachella from indie and electronic music, and Bonnaroo from folk. Initially, these identities would shape not only the festival lineups but also the expectations of the audience.

However, as time passes across all three genre charts, there’s an obvious trend of rock receding in favor of hip-hop and pop taking over the music festival scene. This directional shift shows that festivals which started by booking artists of distinct musical niches, have shifted into booking from similar genre palettes. Genre labels don’t always tell the full story of festival evolution, though. Can the same convergence be said about the sound of these artists, not just the labels often attributed to them?

For each song, Spotify calculates scores of certain audio features, ranging from song tempo measured in beats per minute (bpm), to scores of "danceability" and “speechiness” on a scale of 0.0-1.0. With an average of these song features per artist, we can plot individual artists on a scale of features that define their sound, and what they mean in the context of music festivals.

Beginning at the years of each festival’s creations, the clusters of artists on the scale of valence vs acousticness can visually show the convergence of artist sound, not just genre. At the onset of the three festivals existing at the same time, they overlap in a relatively spread out region, but have their own clusters of sound category. Lollapalooza remains soundly in the lowest rungs of acousticness, with Bonnaroo branching towards high acousticness and high valence, and Coachella heading in the opposite direction of low valence but high valence as well.

By the late 00s, the artists of all three festivals tightly clustered together in a region of mid-valence and low acousticness, reflecting the growing popularity of early 2010’s electronic dance music (EDM). Passing through this phase, the artists begin to expand outwards once more, but without nearly as much distinction between festivals that they previously had. Until the present day, the spread of these headliners grow and shrink together, encroaching on each other’s space as they go.

Clearly, headliner distinctions have blurred. Today, many point to the fact that festival headliners increasingly overlap across festivals that cater to unique audiences. A 2019 USA Today article said:

Last week saw the rollouts of the Lollapalooza and Woodstock 50 lineups, and despite their drastically different locations, the tops of their lineups didn't look much different from Coachella, Governors Ball, Boston Calling, Bonnaroo and the rest of America's biggest festivals.

The best advice for fans clamoring to get tickets? Save your money, considering music festivals have turned into a homogenized gimmick for big businesses that barely allow concertgoers the serendipity of discovering new acts.

But how true are these criticisms of the current music industry? In 2024, Chris Dalla Riva analyzed this claim in an article in “Can’t Get Much Higher” and found that the headliner uniqueness rate (i.e. headliners that appeared at only 1 festival) increased from 62% to 66% across the decade. See the Figure below. If anything, the data show that headliners have become more distinctive over the years, contrary to widespread belief. So, overlapping headliners is largely a myth, and is likely because of some people noticing a few headliners on multiple lineups.

It is still true that the distinction in festival culture has waned over the years, which is likely because many different festivals are now owned by major corporations. For example, Live Nation now owns Bonnaroo, Governors Ball, and many more, and companies would often prioritize larger profits through appealing to people rather than the culture of the specific festival. Today’s festivals are not being criticized specifically because they copy each other’s artist lineups, but rather because they all draw from the same pool of artists that sound similar across Spotify metrics.

Another major factor to the generalization of culture is Spotify’s domination in the music industry. It is unlikely, for example, that you find a classical pianist at Coachella as no classical pianist could pull in an extremely large number of views on Spotify. Genre plays a significant role in how Spotify’s algorithms affect artists. As Martina wrote on iMusician in November of 2025, Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has recently shifted more towards engagement metrics such as high completion rates, repeat listens, saves, playlist adds, and shares. Mainstream pop, hip-hop, commercial indie, or electronic music’s high engagement metrics keep them consistently at the top of Spotify’s most popular music. Spotify’s new algorithm is emblematic of “the rich get richer,” suppressing nicher music genres and causing popular festival headliner genres to converge.

Unique of Spotify recommendations, what metrics are used by these festivals to determine next years’ headliners? In general, festivals don’t make their process of choosing artists transparent, so we came up with some of our own headliner qualifications.

Lineups of each festival tend to contain a variety of genres and plenty of recognizable artists.

As an example, these are the number of monthly listeners each headlining artist had for the past 3 years, the week they were announced for Lollapalooza. They are colored by genre, and it’s evident that the threshold for being a headliner is different by genre and relatively stable. For example, pop and hip-hop artists need a much higher listener count than indie or rock does to be announced as a headliner. Listener thresholds are more accurately analyzed by averaging the listening data by genre for the past few years, rather than giving one number that performers must match.

But even more important, if not more, is an artist’s growth rate. How much has this artist risen to popularity in the last few months, whether it be due to a resoundingly successful debut album, or a song that reached several hundred million streams from being a viral audio on TikTok?

Festivals are more inclined to book artists that they know audiences will want to see, who are currently trending in the popular media. While longstanding fan-favorites are inevitably featured every year, they consistently appear alongside rising artists with hit songs that anyone scrolling on social media for more than a few days could easily identify. Visualizing recent headliners by their listener count at the time of their announcement, against their growth rate the six months leading up to it, we can roughly split headliners into two main categories.

First, there are those in the top left (high recent growth, less overall listeners). These can be labelled as newly popular artists, who have most likely put out a single or album in the last year that’s taken off on social media. Then, the contrasting group comprises those below the cutoff of positive vs negative growth rate, and typically leaning towards having a larger established fanbase. The exceptions to these two categories are mostly DJs, such as Dom Dolla or John Summit of Bonnaroo, who have a slightly different listener trajectory, which is made more unpredictable by the fact that DJ sets are typically enjoyed live, rather than streamed.

There are some other possibly predictive factors involved that are hard to quantify with the data we can gather at the moment. Artists in festivals often have an album anticipated to release that year for promotional purposes, but most artists don’t announce an album for months in advance, which doesn’t give us enough leeway to do popularity guesswork all the way into next year. Additionally, most artists will perform more than one festival within a certain timeframe to gain more exposure, since festival-specific setlists are more worthwhile to develop for multiple sets in a tour, but we can’t quantify that if other festivals headlined also haven’t been announced yet.

As a whole, festival lineups are an art of balance: selectively combining culturally relevant artists who are on the rise in popular media, with ones that have a loyal fanbase, who may adhere to the original festival personalities more. As time goes on, Spotify algorithms have shifted this balance by constraining the artist pool further and encouraging these festivals to converge. However, convergence is not necessarily a bad thing, because in this scenario, each festival has characteristics that keep them distinct despite the effect of the mainstream.