Coachella Lineup: How the agencies ranked

The full Coachella 2020 lineup is out. We take a look at the talent agencies behind the artists hitting the desert later this year.

📈 About the data - ROSTR tracks artist rosters & data for thousands of labels, mgmt co's & agencies. We cross-referenced the Coachella '20 lineup with our data on which agencies represent each artist for the USA. See end for more info.

👉 Interactive report - Click on the charts to visit company profile on ROSTR. n.b. you'll need an account to do that, if you don't have one yet, request a free invite here.

Who booked the Coachella lineup?

Behind the scenes of the famous lineup poster: We've replaced each artist with the agency that books that artist for North America / USA.

Lineup Share By Agency

Coachella announced 175+ artists on the lineup - the chart below shows the agencies with the highest share of artists on the bill.

⭐️ Paradigm have by far the largest share, representing 1 in 3 artists on the lineup.

⭐️ WME (16%) & CAA (13%) are next up. However, even added together their share doesn't match Paradigm's).

⭐️ UTA come in 4th with 9% of the lineup.

⭐️ Outside of the majors, SF based independents Liaison Artists have the highest share with 5%.

⭐️ Just 4 agencies - Paradigm, WME, CAA & UTA represent almost 75% of the lineup.

Who booked the top 2 rows?

While the lineup poster doesn't always reflect the eventual order of play at the festival, the top-two rows (& their font-size) are the most sought after spots. Who got them?

Poster Positioning

The chart below shows the distribution of an agency's artists down the lineup. We've broken it down by: Headliners (top row on the poster), Sub-Headliners (2nd row), 3rd Row & 4th Row+ (Undercard).

⭐️ Paradigm have the most artists overall & the most artists on the top-two rows, but the bulk (73%) of their artists are on the undercard.

⭐️ WME & CAA artists skew higher up the poster. Just under 50% of WME's artists appear on the 3rd row or above.

⭐️ Liaison Artists' 5% share shows their strength in the N.A. electronic space. Their artists fill many of the undercard DJ / Electronic spots.

📈 Analysis

⭐️ Paradigm: according to data on ROSTR, Paradigm have ~2.8K artists on their roster (~1K more than the next largest agency). This scale has no doubt contributed to their dominance this year, but their presence throughout the lineup (including leading the top rows) suggests their dominance this year is down much more than scale & sets them up nicely for the next few years.

⭐️ WME & CAA: the traditional agency power-houses may have fewer artists than Paradigm on their rosters (& the lineup) but the artists they do have are packing bigger punches with a significantly higher proportion of their artists filling the top slots on the lineup vs the undercard. This could reflect a focus on more premium artists AND/OR reflects a trend for superstar artists to move to one of the "big guys" once they're already established.

⭐️In our recent report on The World's Leading Artist Management Companies we noted the amount of fragmentation in the MGMT ecosystem relative to the label world. The opposite may be true when it comes to mainstream market share in the agency world with just 4 companies, whose rosters run in the thousands of artists, dominating the landscape. We count just 21 agencies in total represented on the lineup, with only 11 agencies landing more than 1 artist on this year's lineup.

🕒 We'll run this report again for more festivals in 2020, as well as for next year's Coachella lineup so we can track trends over time.

ℹ️ More Info

This report is based on data ROSTR has collated for hundreds of booking agencies around the world. A few caveats:

  • Some of ROSTR's info is verified by the companies themselves (look for the claimed tick on ROSTR), however, some data is collected from publicly available info.

  • Artists frequently switch booking agencies or change territories. As a result, while we've made our best efforts to verify the data in this report, it's likely that some of the information in this report is out of date.

  • For the purposes of this report we've used data from ROSTR to determine which agency represents each artist on the lineup for the USA (where Coachella is held).

If you have any questions or if your company is featured in this report and you'd like to correct some data please get in touch at data@rostr.cc.

The World's Leading Artist Management Companies

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In a first-of-its-kind report, we use data from ROSTR to look into the artist management companies whose rosters are dominating streaming & the charts.

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