Coachella Announces to Sell Lifetime Festival Passes as NFTs

Coachella has announced a new partnership with cryptocurrency exchange FTX to auction off lifetime passes to the festival as NFTs. 

The project is beginning with the launch of Coachella’s NFT marketplace and the release of its first NFT series, Coachella Collectibles. The three NFT collections within Coachella Collectives include 10-lifetime festival passes, on-site experiences, physical products, and digital collectibles, all verifiable through blockchain technology.

Sam Schoonover, Innovation Lead for Coachella said, “We’ve all seen how NFTs enable true ownership of art and media on the internet. We wanted to take it one step further and use NFTs to enable ownership of experiences in the real world, too. Only blockchain technology can give us the unique ability to offer tradable lifetime passes to Coachella for the first time ever. We’re excited about building a new utility and community for our fans with NFTs, and in FTX we found the partner that we trust to provide us with infrastructure and support to help us usher in this new frontier.”

A portion of all sales will be donated to GiveDirectly, an organization that makes it possible to directly donate to people living in poverty, Lideres Campesians, which works to strengthen the leadership of farmworker women and girls and Find Food Bank, a regional food bank serving the Coachella Valley region.

While the music-oriented NFT marketplace is exploding, lifetime passes are still currently rare. In March of 2021, Kings of Leon auctioned off six different “Golden Ticket” NFTs, each giving the owner four front-row seats to one show of every Kings of Leon headlining tour for life. Sales of these “Golden Tickets” generated roughly $633,000.

—Apeksha Priya