MISS SHOULD HAVE BEEN HEADLINER
A Content Analysis Tracking Gender Representation Across 15 Years at the Coachella Music Festival.
Ryan Kahler | June 12, 2025
By analyzing commercial success, consumer behavior, and the widespread popularity of pop artists, I observed a clear gap between audience demand for diverse artists and the equality of stage programming at Coachella Music Festival. In 2024, female artists claimed eight of the top ten most-streamed albums on Spotify. Yet, in 2025, only one out of three Coachella headliners was a woman, and just six of the fifteen main stage acts were all-women acts. Years featuring lineups with strong female representation saw higher ticket sales, while years lacking diversity experienced noticeable drops in attendance. My research dives into the financial benefits of diverse lineups in the music festival industry.
Background
The iconic Coachella Music Festival is an annual two-weekend music and arts festival featuring hundred of performers and artists spread out across two consecutive three-day weekends, followed by the country music festival Stagecoach. The events are hosted in Indio, California and combined generate over $700 million for the local economy each year.
Coachella continues to expand and evolve over the years. This year, in 2025, performances by the likes of Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, Green Day and even a surprise appearance by Senator Bernie Sanders, instantly went viral on social media. Coachella’s diverse lineups, celebrity-studded audience, and ample commercial opportunities for brands and social media influencers make it one of the most popular and profitable music festivals in the world.
The festival has always been a microcosm of cultural dialogue, where music merges with politics and pop culture. This year, the conversation reached a fever pitch when Charli XCX appeared at an afterparty wearing a sash reading, “Miss Should Have Been Headliner”. Compounded by intense social media backlash, this incident triggered discussions about artistic sensibilities, hierarchical dynamics in the music industry, and the role of festival organizers in programming opportunities equally.
Critics called this move insensitive, petty, and self-serving, but I believe it raises serious questions about gender representation at music festivals throuhgout history, which is what shaped my research. The moment wasn’t just about ego; it sparked a broader debate about who gets recognized in massive cultural institutions and why.
My research does not aim to pit artists against each other. Rather I take a business-first mindset, attempting to analyze what years Coachella was succesful or unsuccseful in alligning festival programming with consumer behavior. When Coachella programming was misalligned with consumer behavior, ticket and merch sales and media engagement were impacted negativeley. In years where Coachella successfully alligned with consumer behavior, tickets sold out almost instantly, fans were dripped out in merchandise, and the internet was buzzing.
Methods
In order to uncover these trends, I performed a qualitative content analysis of the Coachella set-time posters from 2011 to 2025. I used a purposive sampling method to focus specifically on the main stage because it represents the highest level of visibility and prestige at the festival. Artists who perform on the main stage attract the largest audiences, the longest set times, and are generally positioned as the most culturally relevant acts of the event each year. Rather than analyzing the entire festival lineup, which includes hundreds of artists spread across multiple stages and tiers, I deliberately narrowed my scope to the main stage in order to isolate trends of power and stratification at the top levels of industry recognition and influence.
I developed a coding framework which categorized each main stage performance by year, genre, set time, set duration in minutes, headliner status, gender makeup, and race/ethnicity. I coded for genre to understand how representation might vary across genres. This was an important dimension of the analysis because certain genres, like rock and hip-hop, have historically been dominated by male performers, and often reflect the most present gender-based status inequalities in the industry. Genre coding allowed me to observe patterns like whether women are more commonly represented in pop acts, while men dominate rock or electronic dance music (EDM), and whether certain genres correlate with longer or more prestigious set times.
The gender coding was more nuanced than a binary male/female label to reflect the complexity of group acts.
M: all-male members
F: all-female members
PM: predominantly-male with at least one female member
PF: predominantly-female with at least one male member
D: duo with a 1:1 gender ratio
V: variable lineup (acts whose members change over time with no consistent gender makeup)
These distinctions allowed for a more accurate depiction of gender representation, especially for bands, DJ groups, or collaborative acts that don’t fall neatly into traditional gender categories. By breaking it down this way, I aimed to capture the idea that representation isn’t just about presence, but also about positioning and prominence.
While my project didn’t necessarily focus on racial disparities in the industry, I decided to code for race to consider how other identity factors may intersect with gender in shaping who gets access to performance capital in the music industry. This sample provides a manageable yet meaningful synoptic view of Coachella’s programming practices over a 15-year span, allowing for evaluation if they are progressing toward more equitable representation. I then compared each year’s data with the Spotify Wrapped data, to serve as my consumer behavior metric.
The observations from my data led me to develop 2 research questions:
1. How do set times, slot placements and artist visibility on the Coachella lineup perpetuate gender inequality in the music industry?
Why are certain artists consistently given shorter sets or earlier slots?
What does genre have to do with these disparities?
How do these decisions reflect broader cultural assumptions about who is deserving of space, power, resources, and legitimacy is the music industry?
2. How does artist diversity impact the overall success of the festival?
By analyzing these aspects this project goes beyond asking, “Are women underrepresented in music?”, and instead explores deeper questions about the value and visibility of women in the music industry.
Literature Review
In their review of event and festival management, Mair and Weber (2019) highlight that contemporary research in this field lacks sociological and anthropological connection. Much of the work has taken a inward business perspective: how to market, manage, stage a festival and how to provide quality service and experience for stakeholders. However, very little festival research has been outwardly focused, considering how festivals may be mechanisms for achieving other (social, cultural, political, behavioral, etc.) aims. In order to survive, festivals have to be succesful business products. But, in order to achieve other objectives, organizers need to be aware of social issues.
For artists, performing at Coachella is a unique, career defining milestone akin to a Olympic gold medal for athletes. The main stage in particular hosts a massive platform for fans at the festival but also fans across the globe who tune into the livestream. In the field of music, this form of cultural capital places artists in a Hall of Fame which secures their legitimacy and honors them for their dedication to the craft. Cultural capital refers to skills, knowledge, dispositions, worldviews, interactional styles, and other cultural competencies that function as resources, and can be exchanged for other kinds of capital like money or work opportunities (economic capital), valuable social networks (social capital), and prestige (symbolic capital) (Bourdieu 1984).
Bourdieu outlines three types of cultural capital.
Objectified cultural capital describes material goods like clothing, art, music, through which individuals display their tastes.
Institutionalized cultural capital refers to formal accreditations like winning a Grammy, or headlining a major music festival.
Embodied cultural capital describes skills, knowledge, behaviors, dispositions, and modes of interaction.
Miller (2017) coins another form of cultural capital within the industry of arts: performance capital.
Performance capital is a field-specific form of embodied cultural capital that exists in all fields of music, but is subtly adapted to each field’s genre conventions.
For example, the skills and dispositions valued as performance capital likely differ in punk and country music.
Heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and rock foreground toughness, exaggerated bravado, and heterosexual prowess (Miller 2017).
Grazian (2005) finds that Chicago Blues artists are predominantly Black men with a grizzled, working-class self-presentation as blues musicians.
The ability to enact these conventions functions as a localized form of habitus within the greater industry (Miller 2017).
However, the norms and values that define performance capital are not universally accessible; they are often gendered, privileged performances that align with dominant (typically white and/or masculine) ideals within a genre (Miller 2017).
In this context, when a woman enters certain male-dominated genres, she breaks the established “cultural code” of who should have access to capital within the genre.
Authors have noted that in many music scenes women have difficulty accessing the cultural capital because others call women’s taste and authenticity into question far more readily than they do men’s (Miller 2017). The inequalities female musicians experience can often result from a combination of not only gender, but also ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, age, nationality, religion, and disability.
Cultural capital is a key mechanism through which consumers of music create cultural distinctions and hierarchies: for example, between real fans and posers, or between authentic and inauthentic musicians (Force 2009). Female artists, like female CEO’s, are expected to know how to sell “herself”, she must also not take up “too much space” to avoid seeming like a “troublemaker” (Miller 2017). These contradictory demands, which cannot simultaneously be satisfied, correspond to a typical gendered social position that requires a delicate balance between putting oneself forward and effacing oneself.
Successful albums are often critiqued based on their cultural impact: does the album yield something new? Does it capture a collective feeling, a political moment, a social mood, or a powerful aesthetic? For women in music, the bar is especially high: they must consistently produce chart-topping hits, maintain a public image as a “role model”, and build intense, loyal fan bases that go beyond casual listening. All the while, even while delivering all these expectations, women continue to be underrepresented on the world’s biggest stages, particularly at Coachella.
Interestingly the emergence and popularization of pop music has had fascinating and subversive implications of gender dynamics in the music industry. Pop ironically became one of the most powerful vehicles for challenging traditional structural barriers, despite being historically dismissed within the industry as overly commercial, emotionally excessive, or lacking in authenticity, a dismissal often gendered and classed (Miller 2017).
Yet, the traits that often mark pop as illegitimate have become central to its sociological power as a form of resistance. The genre’s embrace of spectacle, emotionality, performativity and theatrics, and visual aesthetics enables pop artists to challenge hegemonic norms about who gets to be considered a “real artist”. The massive commercial success of pop artists, many of whom are women, queer, and persons of color, disrupts the presumed link between cultural legitimacy and masculine-dominant genres like rock or hip-hop. The subversion of creatives toward minority individuals can allow for the development of new aesthetics, which are highly sought after in the capitalist music industry (Vachet 2024).
From a Durkheim perspective, the phenomenon of pop fandom is a form of contemporary totemism (idolization). Fan communities build collective identities around pop figures, investing them with secret meaning (inside jokes, etc.) and using them as symbols of resistance, belonging, and self expression. Pop’s lack of definition has allowed artists to amass extraordinarily diverse and powerful fanbases. Many artists intentionally blur lines, opening space for broader identification among listeners. As a result, fandoms are supercharged with a sense of community, representation, and collective empowerment (Deflem 2017).
From the viewpoint of the superfan, live concerts allow for interaction with the performing artist as well as with other fans in the community. Through other avenues, both online and in the physical world, music fans can create a collective identity to their fandom (Deflem 2017). Artists can market to different communities to increase capital, expand their audience, and ultimately monopolize multiple different sectors of music/other industries, to become a global powerhouse “superstar” (Deflem 2017).
Fans express loyalty by dedicating time, energy, and money to their favorite artists. For example, participating in online forums, operating fan social media sites, branding themselves with tattoos, purchasing merchandise showcasing the artist, voting for the artists in award show competitions, supporting and promoting new releases from the artists all keep their favorite artists leveraged.
For this fandom to sustain, the artist must show a similar love, respect, and dedication back to their fans. An artist performs reciprocal dedication to their fandom by signing autographs, hosting private listening/music release parties, touring, participating in meet and greets, interacting with fan sites and networks, and staying active on social media.
In the study of popular culture, the participation of an audience is inevitable. It is difficult for an artist in the music industry, or a CEO of a company, or a religious leader to remain successful in their respective landscape without the presence of an audience/community. Therefore, it was crucial for me to take a consumer perspective while completing my own research.
Findings
My analysis led me to several findings. While some progress has been made in increasing the overall presence of female artists, queer artists, and artists of color on the main stage, significant imbalances remain in the way performance opportunities are distributed. One of the clearest indicators of this is in set time duration. On average, all-male acts were granted longer performance slots than female-led or mixed-gender acts, even when controlling for headliner status.
Genre also plays a significant role in shaping who gets seen and heard. Genres historically dominated by white, heterosexual men (rock, hip-hop, and EDM) made up a large share of main stage programming. These genres were overwhelmingly male-led and tended to be given longer sets and later time slots. In contrast, pop music, while often more diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexuality of artists, was frequently placed earlier in the day and assigned shorter set durations. This finding is especially striking given the commercial success, consumer habits, and mass appeal of pop artists, pointing to a disconnect between audience demand and institutional recognition.
In 2024, the top eight of ten most streamed albums of the year on Spotify were occupied by female artists (Spotify, 2024). Yet, in 2025 only one of three Coachella headliners were women, and only six of fifteen main stage acts were all-women. A year-by-year breakdown further reveals that headlining slots remain disproportionately male. Even in years when more gender diversity was visible on the lineup overall, the prime-time, high-visibility headlining positions continue to favor male performers. Of the 45 total headliner slots (three per year), only eight were occupied by all-female acts, with several years featuring no women headliners at all. When women did headline, it was often in collaboration with male acts or grouped as “guest appearances”.
An interesting finding as a result of coding across this 15 year period is tracking when changes in stage representation occured. For instance, from 2011-2017, there were less than five Black artists on the mainstage each year, whereas white artists appeared anywhere from 13 to 20 times. In 2018, there were 8 Black artists and 10 white artists on the main stage. In 2022, for the first year ever there were more Black artists on the main stage than white artists. Similar [hopeful] changes occured in gender representation around 2017. Prior to 2017, men were awarded nearly 20 minutes more minutes of stage time, on average each year. But in 2017 women dominated the time on stage. Following this change in 2017, set duration allocation has been nearly equal ever since, only favoring men by a few minutes on average in 2023 and 2025.
These shifts in representation align closely with broader social movements that gained momentum during the same period. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly after 2013 and reaching global prominence in 2020, prompted widespread calls for racial equity, visibility, and systemic change across industries, including music and entertainment. Coachella’s increasing inclusion of Black artists on the main stage may reflect not just changes in musical taste and consumption, but a cultural shift to uplift historically marginalized voices and artists. Similarly, the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017, sparked urgent conversations about gender inequality, representation, and safety in public and professional spaces. The timing of increased stage time during Coachella 2017 suggests a potential correlation. It is difficult to prove direct causation, but these cultural movements created a sociopolitical context in which festival organizers may have been more conscious of the optics and values behind their lineups, responding to growing expectations for inclusivity and justice.
Another key finding revealed that pop acts have consistently drawn the largest and most diverse audiences at Coachella. The most-watched performances on Coachella’s live streams have consistently been pop acts. In 2023, BLACKPINK (an all-female Korean pop group) drew the largest livestream audience in Coachella history with 2.96 million “Couch-chella” viewers. In 2018, Beyoncé made history as the first African-American woman to headline the festival, attracting 458,000 livestream viewers and catalyzing a global moment that blurred the line between concert and cultural statement. This trend is evident in recent booking decisions, where pop artists have been increasingly placed in headline positions to drive ticket sales and global viewership at Coachella.
While signs of hope emerged from my data, Coachella still has a long way to go to reach equity in its distribution of performance capital. In 2025, only one of three headliners were female. Men were awarded about 3 minutes more performance time on average (which is a major improvement from previous years). Genre-based data reveals where gender discrimination remains most prominent. As of 2025, 24 EDM artists have performed on the main stage. Only one of those artists has been all-female. 64 rock artists have performed on the main stage. Only three have been all-female. 65 hip-hop artists have performed. Only 16 have been all-female. Pop is the only genre which female artists dominate. 30 pop artists have performed on the main stage as of 2025. 17 have been all-female, 9 have been all-male, three have been primarily male, and one male/female duo performed.
Discussion
The data analyzed in this paper reflects a broader transformation in the cultural and structural dynamics of large-scale music festivals like Coachella. While progress has been made in diversifying stage representation, with 2022 marking the first year Black artists outnumbered white artists on the main stage, and a shift toward gender parity in set duration emerging after 2017, these shifts must be understood within the sociopolitical context in which they emerged.
These changes are inseparable from larger social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, which demanded systemic accountability and pushed institutions across industries to confront long-standing inequalities. In this context, Coachella’s gradual diversification can be seen not simply as an industry trend, but as a reaction to cultural and political pressure from its stakeholders.
Despite gradual advancements, my research reveals that women, particularly those who command massive cultural capital, continue to face structural obstacles to achieving headliner or main stage recognition. These obstacles persist even when female artists meet or exceed the expectations of commercial success, artistic innovation, cultural appeal, and global reach.
However, the rise of the pop genre suggests a disruption of genre-based hierarchies. Pop artists frequently transcend rigid genre boundaries, creating inclusive spaces which allow for deeper fan identification and cultural participation. This genre-resistance, often led by women, queer artists, and artists of color, positions pop as a powerful force of resistance and identity formation in the music industry which is dominated by capitalism. The pop genre allows access to cultural capital for artists of varying marginalized identities, which other genres might only afford to certain binary stereotypical identities like rock and hip-hop.
Limitations & Future Research
While my research offers an interesting perspective into gender discrimination within the industry, it is not free of limitations. First, my dataset was limited to mainstage performers, and therefore does not account for representation across smaller stages, which may offer different insights. Additionally, my research relies heavily on publicly available data, which may not capture behind-the-scenes industry decisions or negotiations that shape lineups.
I would have loved to explore other factors like race and sexuality more in depth to offer a more holistic, intersectional lens into systemic inequalities that persist within the music industry. Future studies could expand this research in several directions.
A comparative analysis of multiple music festivals would allow scholars to assess whether similar patterns of gender and racial representation appear across different cultural and geographic contexts. Incorporating ethnographic data such as interviews with artists, booking agents, or festival organizers could provide important insight into decision-making processes behind organizing the lineup each year.
Ultimately, this research reveals the sociopolitical nature which shapes organizational or institutional changes. While Coachella has made incremental moves toward diversity and equitable representation, the exclusion of women from headliner status persists, despite their overwhelming cultural impact, exposing the symbolic hierarchies still embedded within the festival structure and broader music industry as a whole. Yet, through the emergence and popularization of the pop genre, artists are actively reshaping who has access to power within the industry. If trends continue to move in the right direction, one day we may live to see an all-female headlining crew take over the Coachella main stage.
References
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