On January 29th, the Riverside County, California public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaiser announced the cancellation of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2021. In a tweet, shown in full with the link below, Kaiser had included a link to the order, as well as a statement saying “We look forward to when the events may return.”
The festival was set to occur April 9-11 and 16-18 after being postponed twice previously. In March of last year, the original dates scheduled in April 2020 with headliners Travis Scott, Frank Ocean, and Rage Against the Machine were postponed to October. Then in June, they postponed the festival once again to April 2021 with a new set of unannounced headliners. Just recently, the festival has been postponed for the third time from its April dates to happen sometime October 2021. Headlining acts and specific dates are still unknown at this time.
This will be the first time in two decades that the festival will not be happening. After debuting in 1999, the festival has gone on every year since 2001.
Other music festivals that were coming up soon in 2021 have been cancelled as well. The country music festival Stagecoach cancelled its April dates, Ultra Music Festival in Miami is set to cancel their March dates, The Glastonbury Festival in England announced last week that they were cancelling their June dates, and depending on the situations to come, we can expect most upcoming festivals to postpone their shows or events as well.
Hopefully there will be more information put out soon about October 2021 dates, but we can expect things to become more clear as we watch how the pandemic progresses through the next few months.