“The venue is a bit like something has landed in the middle of the desert, and from that is going to come the best electronic music ever, and so you can come with us into the portal.”
So says Romain Pissenem on the second day of Head Trip, the one-time-only dance music festival happening on the Coachella grounds in Indio, Calif. Pissenem and his company High Scream designed the festival’s stage, which, with its oblong shape and lattice of truss behind it, has a spaceship vibe that’s amplified by the dozen or so oblong video projectors that create a circle around the field and the 90,000-strong crowd that’s about to gather here.
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It’s a gorgeous sunny Sunday afternoon, a major improvement from Saturday night (Oct. 10), when the first day of the festival ended early due to lightning and the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel hitting the region. The weather event not only ended Head Trip early, but also cut short the festival livestream by Apple Music that was being broadcast for free on the platform.
It was, in total, a major bummer. But the situation has ramped up anticipation for Sunday night (Oct. 11), as Saturday night’s headliner Calvin Harris — who couldn’t play his show due to the fest ending early — joined a Sunday bill that now features DJ Harvey, Peggy Gou, Kettama b2b Dom Dolla, Skrillex and Swedish House Mafia. It’s a lineup that reads like The Avengers of EDM.
Crowds will soon be swarming the field to see these shows in a space that Pissenem and his team designed to be a container where every attendee can feel like they’re in the heart of the rave. “When you save much money to go to see something and sometimes have the worst seat at the end of the venue,” says Pissenem, “I always think of those people, because my family had a modest income so that could’ve been me when I was a kid. I design so that anywhere you are, you can see and enjoy the show. For me, that’s a very personal, important thing.”
Countless others will have a different but similarly excellent view of the show on Apple Music, with Head Trip being the platform’s biggest dance music offering since its Club Live launched in May with a broadcast from EDC Las Vegas. Head Trip is the first full festival video livestream in the platform’s history, in any genre.
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“This is an event we’re very proud of and that we’ve been putting everything we have into,” says Danny Bell, senior vp of talent at Goldenvoice, which is producing Head Trip. “The whole concept was a one-and-done show with the titans of a genre done at a very large scale, and we just felt like it should be shared and captured. It’s that simple.”
Apple Music was a natural partner to execute the project, particularly as Goldenvoice founder Paul Tollett and vp of Apple Music and international content Oliver Schusser “have been talking about doing something together for a long time,” says Apple Music’s global head of dance and electronic Stephen Campbell. “Danny and I are friends and have very similar taste and outlook on dance music, and this is one of the biggest lineups of the year, so it just felt like the perfect opportunity.”
While festival livestreams are a dance industry standard — Coachella, EDC Las Vegas and Ultra all livestream the event — what made this one different wasn’t just the lineup and one-time-only format that borrowed from that of previous Goldenvoice events Desert Trip and Power Trip, which featured icons of classic rock and metal, respectively. It was the distribution strategy. Rather than keeping the broadcast exclusive to one platform, Apple Music distributed the stream as far and wide as possible, broadcasting it simultaneously across Apple Music’s accounts on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch. Fans could also listen to the audio-only simulcast on Apple Music 1, Apple Music Club, TuneIn and SiriusXM. In a unique video on demand strategy, videos of each performance will go up on each DJ’s respective YouTube channel, with the audio-only sets living exclusively on Apple Music.
“We want the most amount of people around the world to experience this, so we’re not gatekeeping it,” says Campbell. “We’re doing the exact opposite — taking it as far as we can possibly go. Wherever you are in the world, you can watch this, listen to it, experience it.”
This philosophy extended to the Sunflower Soundsystem stage, the festival’s intimate, tended club space that was curated by Floating Points and hosted sets by artists including Ben UFO, Theo Parrish and Avalon Emerson. The area wasn’t livestreamed, but was recorded in spatial audio for exclusive release on Apple Music after the festival.
For Pissenem — whose CV includes producing the 2024 Paris Olympics closing ceremony, France’s 2026 Statue of Liberty birthday event, work with DJs and clubs including Gou, Dom Dolla and Ibiza’s Hï and [UNVRS] (and who was knighted by the French government earlier this year) — designing a stage that would work both for the 90,000 people on the field and the countless others watching on their phones and laptops around the world required dual planning and design. “You need to think of both,” he says, “because this is not the same show. Doing a show for social media, for a livestream and for a live show is totally different.” His design presentation even included renderings showing how the stage would look in a phone’s portrait mode. “When you do something, it goes all around the world, so you have to think about different cultures, different nationalities. How do you do something that’s going to work for everyone?”
The answer, in Pissenem’s case, was the massive oblong structure — roughly 100 feet tall and 330 feet long — built from reflective inflatable material that shifts in appearance as the light changes throughout the night. Each artist’s production team then layered their own visuals and lighting on top of this shared rig. (High Scream worked directly with Fisher and Chris Lake‘s teams for the visuals for their Saturday night show as Under Construction.) “It is all in the same design,” Pissenem says, “but each artist can bring his own art direction, so basically, each artist feels like a very different show.”
For Apple Music, the investment represents something larger than a single event. The platform has been steadily building its dance music infrastructure, most recently through Club Live, its live DJ mix offering. Choosing a dance festival as its most ambitious livestream to date is a statement of intent.
“The evolution of the dance business as a business has exploded over the past few years,” says Campbell, “and for us to put all of our creative investment, intellectual investment and financial investment into something like this, and for it to be dance music, it just makes a lot of sense.”
Goldenvoice’s Bell sees it the same way. The company has now staged three one-time-only events on the Coachella grounds, each one providing a snapshot of a genre at a particular cultural peak. “The dance music rise has been occurring over these last few years,” he says. “We started working on this over a year ago, just piecing it together to see whether it could work, and the stars just aligned this year. I think we caught the right moment.”
