Coachella And OpenSea Are Launching Coachella Keepsakes NFTs For Exclusive Festival Experiences And Products

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The ticket industry has come a long way from flashing a piece of paper to get into an event. Case in point: Coachella’s new partnership with leading NFT marketplace OpenSea. Today (March 5), the companies announced Coachella Keepsakes, a series of three NFT collections that serve as passes to “some of the festival’s most exclusive experiences and products,” per a press release.

The first of them is The VIP Pass + Oasis Lounge Keepsake, which launched today and will be available for purchase until April 1 (although only 1,000 will be made available). This asset will offer access to a 2024 VIP Festival Pass and the Oasis Lounge, a new offering described as “a serene space offering exclusive bar benefits with limited complimentary drinks, a shaded lounge, and more.”

The second collection, the Canvas Welcome Box Keepsake, launches March 25 and “will offer varying levels of utility, including unique merchandise, digital content, and access to the Rose Garden VIP area, among other benefits.” The final drop lands in mid-April and “will introduce an artist collaboration, promising yet another layer of exclusive benefits for Coachella attendees,” with more details to be unveiled later this month. More information about the NFT collections is available here.

Sam Schoonover, Innovation Lead for Coachella, says, “Our collaboration with OpenSea begins a new chapter in how we use NFTs to provide unique custom experiences for Coachella in real life and online. We’re moving towards a future where Coachella isn’t just an event you attend, but an experience you can own and shape based on the digital tokens in your possession. We’re enabling this future with OpenSea, a trusted and secure marketplace that helps us safely provide these new opportunities to fans.”

Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, also says, “We are thrilled to embark on this journey with Coachella, a festival that has dominated the cultural zeitgeist for over two decades. Since our inception in 2017, we’ve been at the forefront of the NFT revolution, witnessing firsthand the expansion of digital ownership and its evolving utilities. Our partnership with Coachella represents a significant milestone, uniting the digital with the physical in ways that promise to enrich the festival experience and usher in a new paradigm in the live event and ticketing industry.”

Coachella Is Selling An NFT That Includes A Lifetime Guest Pass To The Festival

For the first time ever in the festival’s history, Coachella is selling lifetime guest passes to the event, and it’s happening via an NFT called the Coachella Keys Collection. Ten tokens will be auctioned off that includes passes to the fest every April and VIP experiences in 2022 — which features headliners Billie Eilish, Kanye West, and Harry Styles — like front row views at the Coachella Stage, on-stage access at the Sahara Tent, and a celebrity chef dinner in the Rose Garden.

“We’ve all seen how NFTs enable true ownership of art and media on the internet,” Sam Schoonover, Innovation Lead for Coachella, said in a statement. “We wanted to take it one step further and use NFTs to enable ownership of experiences in the real world, too.”

In addition to the Coachella Keys Auction, which starts this Friday, Coachella is also offering two NFT collections that feature digital collectibles and physical posters and photo books, all through the FTX crypto exchange. There are 10,000 each of the Sights & Sounds Collection ($60), which features 10 digital festival images and a physical print of one of the ten. There are also 10,000 NFTs in the Desert Reflection Collection ($180), which includes 1 of 10 digital renditions of a Coachella poster by Emek and a copy of the photo book, Coachella | The Photographs 1999-2019.

FTX US’s President Brett Harrison added, “Not only are we excited to partner with a progressive forward-thinking music festival in Coachella, but also working together to make the world a better place.”

Lofty goals aside, it’ll be interesting to see how much the 10 Coachella keys NFT’s fetch at an auction. The sales go live online on Friday, February 4 at 10 a.m. PT through Friday, February 11 at 5 p.m. PT at nft.coachella.com.