What we saw in full force Friday night was a generational disconnect, mixed with a mismatch of expectations.
A large portion of your average, mainstream festival-goer of 2014 heads out their front door with a different expectation than their counterparts in the past. Festivals today with any sort of electronic tilt have implicitly promised stratospheric production values, insane light shows, and flawless control of crowd energy: in summary, an opportunity to lose your fucking mind. You can plop down hundreds of dollars without knowing a single artist and still know you’re going to have a blast. The needle has slowly shifted away from “music,” towards “party.”
Which is why many forms of music outside of the electronic sphere now just can’t hang with even a GTA or a Deniz Koyu at a major festival. The bar for energy and excitement has been set too high, and the mainstream interest at attending music festivals, driven by the proliferation of EDM mega-fests, has brought in a wide swath of people who simply aren’t what readers of a site like this would consider music fans.
Read the full story here: http://edm.com/blog/why-its-EDMs-fault-Outkast-flopped-coachella-2014?curator=MediaREDEF