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It's as though the sad, lamentable death of recorded music was accompanied by a kick-ass wake. Sure, label executives have had to sell their fancy homes and put their kids in public schools, but the rest of us have been feasting on a musical smorgasbord.

Nothing better exemplifies this than Coachella, the crown jewel among destination music festivals, a sort of spring break for music lovers. Three days of music, over bands, repeated over two weekends the second week starts on Friday featuring a wonderful cross-section of music world old and new - Red Hot Chili Peppers, Moby, Wu Tang Clan, Social Distortion, Japandroids, Vampire Weekend, and more.

Coachella is part of a rapid build-up in stationary music festivals, big and small, across the country and reflective of live music's explosion of growth since the millennium. While it won't compensate for a 50 percent drop in U. While downloading may have sapped music sales, it's only amplified people's desire to experience music up close and personal.

You don't call, you don't write notes. You don't pop up at your friends' house. We're not touching each other," says the rapper Murs, who founded the Paid Dues festival in Los Angeles. Our Paid Dues review. It's a booming business, even for newcomers.

Sensing a score, the field's getting crowded. A hardly exhaustive list on Wikipedia logs different major festivals across the country. Live Nation alone put on 18 last year, including Jay-Z's new Made in America, Sasquatch in the Gorge in Washington, and Atlanta's Music Midtown, each of which sold out.

That's the power of an established brand. It's also why so many promoters are taking their shot. Apparently that only holds until a festival's established itself, at which point you grab for more. Coachella founder Paul Tollet came up the way most festival promoters do - in bars and clubs. He began by booking his older brother's Perry's band The Targets.

While attending Cal-Poly Pomona, Tollet hooked up with Goldenvoice founder Gary Tovar, who funded his promotion company with proceeds from pot dealing. Tovar eventually took a rap and went to jail, signing over his control in the company to Tollet and his partner Rick Van Santen in ' They moved to a square-foot Beverly Hills address to impress the booking agents and benefited from Nirvana's breakthrough as the bands they'd been promoting for years suddenly became big draws.

They had plenty of cash flow, and were booking shows a year, but were digging themselves deeper in debt. Coachella was going to be the big score that pulled them out of debt. Tollet described it as a "Hail Mary" in an OC Weekly story a year ago.

Goldenvoice vice president Skip Page recalls the accountant bawling loudly that last night of the first Coachella when it became clear how much money they'd lost. That would've been it, had it not been for the relationships Tollet had built with bands over the years. Headliners such as Beck, Rage Against the Machine, and Tool waited patiently for as many as five months to get paid. Employees regularly accepted checks with more bounce than a SuperBall. Tollet and Van Santen eventually sold their promotion company, Goldenvoice, to AEG Live for just enough money to pay off all the people they owed.

Tollet initially retained full control of Coachella and still holds 50 percent ownership. Paul put his heart and soul into it, but it was his heart and soul, so he had to bring in AEG to share his whole business because he believed so much in it. I had to bring in Vans as a partner to kind of keep me going until we gained traction.

I know that it takes a while to be successful. Sponsorship is key to any festival, even if it tries to keep things low-key - as Goldenvoice does at Coachella, more than its sister country-themed fest, Stagecoach, the following weekend. It can be the difference between losing and making money, especially in the beginning, and it helps salve the wounds when the weather turns foul.

Rain is an outdoor festival promoter's greatest enemy and single biggest wild card. Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell tried for a while to keep the corporate brands at bay but found sponsorships the only acceptable way to keep ticket prices down. Of course, sponsorships aren't sitting on a shelf like bottles of Mountain Dew. The good ones typically are reserved for established festivals, and sometimes not even then.

While there was a moment when Warner Brothers considered buying Paid Dues from Murs, he hasn't had any luck finding a top-of-the-bill partner for arguably the finest hip-hop festival in the country. This while securing backing from shoe companies for his solo tours. People tend to shy away from hip-hop. For something that's been proven as an art form and is here to stay - so many people back away from it. It's like pulling teeth to get a sponsorship. I appreciate Monster Energy, Heineken, and some of these sponsors for us, but to get a title sponsor Even after bringing in AEG Live, it wasn't all smooth sailing for Coachella.

Its return was almost sunk by failure to land a suitable headliner. The festival received a lifeline from Farrell, who reunited Jane's Addiction for the second time to play Coachella. By , it had begun to gather real steam with a headlining bill featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys and a reunited The Stooges. By it was a sellout, and has remained so ever since. Even last year when it added a second weekend, it sold out in hours, the lineup still unannounced.

There are only so many big-name acts to anchor a big festival, and they earn good money.

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It's turned into a nice living for some acts. Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire, Mumford and Sons, Chili Peppers, you're at one echelon, and then [the money] does go down steeply.

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For bands further down the rungs, an appearance at a big festival like Coachella or Bonnaroo carries validation and helps attract the attention of other festival promoters. Beyond that, there's the opportunity to reach an audience who might never otherwise hear your band. It feels really good to kind of be in the club.

It's so important doing it just to reach multitudes of people. We know one Bonnarroo performance in terms of fans can be worth three months of touring. So, business-wise, they're great gigs. That's why everyone wants to do them. The growth of dance music and outdoor festivals mirrors trends in Europe with longer traditions. England has several historic outdoor events, such as Reading and Leads and Glastonbury festivals. They have been in existence since the early '60s and '70s, respectively.

The Glastonbury Festival draws more than , a day, though it took off. That fervor has taken time to cross the pond.

In England, live music has outsold recorded music since Explosive festival growth in Europe has sprouted 2,, festivals yearly and in England alone, a 73 percent increase since That's a lot more than here and cause for suggestions of over-saturation.

Last year, it reached a breaking point. More than a dozen major English festivals shut down Big Chill, Sonisphere, Cloud 9 , thanks to the EU's ongoing financial troubles, Olympic competition Glastonbury cited an expected shortage of porta-potties , and a very rainy summer. Market saturation, combined with the difficulty finding big enough acts for fans to justify the several-hundred-dollar expenditure, also contributed to the situation.

In America, there's the added challenge that any independent concert promoter is competing with Live Nation and AEG Live, who have added leverage because they can promise additional gigs at area amphitheatres and clubs under their control. Nonetheless, MMMF scored a stellar lineup this year featuring the Roots, The Shins, Les Claypool, Heartless Bastards, Deer Tick, Edward Sharpe, Dr.

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Dog, Umphrey's McGee, and Yonder Mountain String band. Maybe our relationships with the agents are good and maybe they understand why we're doing it. The concert industry is about 60 percent the size of the recorded-music market over here. But that didn't prevent a number of bigger music festivals from shutting down during the last few years.

Among them are South Florida's Langerado, Canada's Pemberton B. All but Langerado failed to survive past their second year, a testament to the difficulty in getting a new festival off the ground, even for established operators.

Melvin Benn, director of the UK promoters Festival Republic Reading and Leeds, the canceled Big Chill , described it as "gambling in its crudest form," since a promoter usually promises to deliver the goods without knowing if people will show. The bigger companies may have even more incentive lately to pull the plug than smaller promoters, who can tolerate smaller margins and a slow build.

This has opened the door for local promoters to launch festivals in secondary and tertiary markets that maybe don't always get the biggest acts. Music festivals' sometimes sketchy economics scare the big boys off. Bongiovanni reports this is still an area of great growth. The economics work a lot easier too. Follow us on Twitter LAWeeklyMusic , and like us at LAWeeklyMusic.

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