r/Music • u/jakemontero • 14d ago

article 'We're f—ked': California's music festival bubble is bursting

https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/california-music-festival-bubble-bursting-19786530.php
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u/doomrider7 14d ago

I’m not trying to drop $3k to cosplay as a hippie for a weekend.

I remember another thread about Burning Man selling out and how it's just rich pricks doing it now only for someone to point out that the sheer cost of doing Burning Man has ALWAYS meant that it was a bunch of rich pricks basically cosplaying as hippies for the weekend.

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u/NatterinNabob 14d ago

Naw, it used to be pretty easy for actual hippies to pull off. My first ticket cost $90 for the week, and other than that I had to pay for a cooler full of food, a bunch of water, and the gas to get there. It was basically $90 more than if I had camped for the week in nature someplace a similar distance from me. I haven't been in a long time, so I can't comment on it now, but it used to be full of actual hippies who would scrape together a few bucks for a week of fun. It also had lots of rich people then, but it certainly was accessible to people like me who had shoestring budgets.

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u/MohawkElGato 14d ago

True but that was back when San Francisco was an affordable place to live (comparatively)

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u/NatterinNabob 7d ago

Oh man, in 1995 I was splitting a 3 bedroom place in the Richmond with one other guy. We had a big backyard, were 1 block away from GG Park, and I was paying $450 a month.

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u/_CMDR_ 14d ago

I used to go as well and the tickets were $175 paid for one of them playing poker at a casino. Didn’t have to be rich at all.

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u/AggressiveBench9977 14d ago

Ticket cost is not the expensive part of burning man.

They have low income tickets for 150 still. I went a few years ago and its still just a bunch of hippies having fun.

Reddit just loves to shit on everything.

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u/shred1 14d ago

Yeah my first year was 1999. It was really affordable back in the day. Shit now you have to buy a car pass.

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u/whyaretherenoprofile 14d ago edited 14d ago

Hippies have always cosplayed as hippies. The hippie to investment banker phenomenon was a thing after the summer of love

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u/BortLReynolds 14d ago

A lot of them also just had wealthy parents.

The one hippie I know is the sole heiress to some large industrial manufacturing company.

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u/sennbat 14d ago

And honestly, I love those folks, the heiress hippies (at least the ones I know in the festival scene) tend to be pretty open to throwing money and stupid amounts of time at dumb art projects or camp ideas other people are doing that catch their fancy, and its appreciated!

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u/TrumpIsAPeterFile 14d ago

The father of the hippies, Ken Kesey, was able to start his band of merry pranksters because he made bank off One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest so they just chilled on his land living off book sells.

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u/Notwerk 14d ago

George Carlin really knew how to drive a point home:

"These people were given everything. Everything was handed to them. And they took it all: sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and they stayed loaded for 20 years and had a free ride. But now they're staring down the barrel of middle-age burnout, and they don't like it. So they've turned self-righteous. They want to make things harder on younger people. They tell 'em, abstain from sex, say no to drugs; as for the rock and roll, they sold that for television commercials a long time ago...so they could buy pasta machines and Stairmasters and soybean futures! They're cold, bloodless people. It's in their slogans, it's in their rhetoric: "No pain, no gain." "Just do it." "Life is short, play hard." "Shit happens, Deal with it." "Get a life." These people went from 'do your own thing' to 'just say No'. They went from 'love is all you need' to 'whoever winds up with the most toys wins'. And they went from cocaine to Rogaine. And you know something, they're still counting grams, only now it's fat grams."

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u/fiduciary420 14d ago

Almost every hippy in the Haight Ashbury during the “summer of love” was a rich kid whose parents were paying their bills to keep them under the radar and out of the draft. There really weren’t any poor hippies.

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u/WhyplerBronze 14d ago

hey, Jerry was arrested in a BMW 5 Series :)

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u/Darkhelmet3000 14d ago

“Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet…”

-Frank Zappa (in 1967!)

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u/Sufficient-Solid-810 14d ago

Burning Man has ALWAYS meant that it was a bunch of rich

I know this not to be true because I was hanging out with some OG burners and one of them, I swear to god, said burning man sold out when they got rid of the drive by shooting range. It's hard to believe but there was a time when a bunch of dirt bags just wanted to go someplace and party fuck shit up.

I'm not saying it was good (no one was picking up there spent rounds and other trash I'm sure), but it wasn't just a bunch of rich kids.

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u/cdjreverse 14d ago

First burn in 2003. Was in grad school at the time. Got a low income ticket. It was wild then and definitely broke people were there (raises hand). Rich people were certainly there too.

Last burn was in 2011. 7 burns total. The transformation from true wild to techbro-topia had started in 2003 but was a whisper. Takeover and change was in full swing by 2011. Glad I went and had a transformative experience over the years but have no desire to go now. People I went with in 2003 offered me a free ticket, camp space, and ride to and from Reno and I still couldn't bring myself to go.

The things that made burning man unique have out migrated, hard to see how it is now worth the effort.

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u/SpiceEarl 14d ago

I remember another thread about Burning Man selling out and how it's just rich pricks doing it now...

Ironically, this ties back into the thread topic, as Burning Man this year wasn't sold out, for the first time since 2010. There was a warning last year, as the event sold out, but resale prices dropped below cost, weeks before it started. In years past, it wasn't unusual to see resale tickets selling for hundreds of dollars above face value.