Festivalgoers Preparing for Coachella 2013
The 2013 Coachella Music and Arts Festival is scheduled to kick off its first weekend Friday.
According to festival organizers, more than 200 musical groups have been lined up to perform throughout the course of the two-weekend event. Headliners include Blur, The Stone Roses, Phoenix and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
USC sophomore Margaret Martin has tickets for the first weekend of Coachella and said she is a fan of many performers in this year's lineup.
"I'm most excited for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Red Hot Chili Peppers," said Martin.
"But I'm probably also going to be really excited when 2 Chainz comes out."
Other festivalgoers shared Martin's excitement. Tickets reportedly sold out with an hour of going on sale. About 80,000 people are expected to attend this year - a significant increase since the first Coachella festival drew a crowd of 10,000 in 1999.
The festival is also dominating social media this week. The Twitter hashtag #Coachella has been trending on Twitter since Wednesday, generating a few hundred Tweets per minute. A map of the festival posted on Facebook Wednesday recieved more than 3,500 "likes" within a day of being posted.
Last year, the festival brought $254.4 million to the desert region of Indio.
