Lollapalooza and the current state of music festivals

Why can't you get tickets?

There's a permanent sway that has held over the music festival market, drifting in one improbable direction in the past six years. Availability for music festivals, such as Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and Coachella, have become slim in recent years, selling out earlier and earlier every season. What results is a fundamental change in the way we, as fans, approach the idea of festivals.

Bonnaroo, Firefly reveal 2013 lineups

Earlier today, both the 2013 Bonnaroo Music Festival and Dover, Delaware's Firefly Festival announced their annual lineups.

Paul McCartney, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mumford and Sons, Bjork, and Wilco will sit at the top billing of the Manchester, Tennessee festival, which is the second of the three major U.S. music festivals to be announced (the third, of course, being Lollapalooza).

Firefly will also boast Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, as well as Coachella and Lollapalooza 2012 headliner Red Hot Chili Peppers. Vampire Weekend, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Foster The People, MGMT, and Kendrick Lamar will also be on top of the billing. For the full lineups, go to the official festival websites linked below.

Bonnaroo will take place June 13-16, with tickets going on sale February 23 at noon EST (here). Firefly will take place the following weekend, June 21-23, with tickets going on sale February 21 (here).

Festival News: Pitchfork Music Fest announces headliners, Lightning In A Bottle moves

A week after Coachella threw its spectacular lineup in all of our misshapen faces, Pitchfork announced the headliners for their annual Chicago festival. R. Kelly, Bjork, and Belle and Sebastian, three not-so-similar but still pretty big names will be headlining the three day event, with many more acts soon to be named to the billing.

In case you've forgotten, whatever happens at Pitchfork cannot happen at Lollapalooza, do to clauses in the festivals' contracts. So for any fans hoping for some combination of those three names - maybe next year.

Tickets for the July 19-21 fest are on sale now, with three-day passes coming in at $120, and single-day passes for a modest $50.

Coachella 2013 lineup revealed

While there was some big news out there today, including a brand new Strokes song that nobody seems to like, yesterday's revealing of the 2013 Coachella lineup is still the big story.

As with last year's lineup, the Indio, California festival will span two separate weekends in April (12-14 and 19-21). Following up last year's impossibly good lineup, this year looks to top it.

Featuring the shockingly rare Blur and Stones Roses as the day one headliners is enough on its own, but throwing acts like Phoenix, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse, New Order, Wu Tang Clan, a reunited Postal Service, and TWO Nick Cave acts make it the early front-runner for festival of the year.

Not just top heavy, the fest's mid-card and lower tier acts are ... just damn good: The Descendants, Thee Oh Sees, Violent Femmes, Major Lazer, Trash Talk, Japandroids, Local Natives, Four Tet, Dinosaur Jr., Danny Brown, Wild Nothing ... it just keeps going.

Click on the poster above to see the full lineup, but tickets won't be available for a few days. There's a special countdown on the Coachella website that you can keep track of, but tickets will sell fast when it comes.

As for Lollapalooza fans, while my status is uncertain this year, Coachella does have some forbearance on who performs at the Chicago festival. In 2011, the two huge events shared 31 acts (18 percent of the billing), although none of the acts were headliners. Last year, only one major headliner (The Black Keys) performed at both.

What does this mean for 2013? Well, don't expect Blur, The Stone Roses, and Red Hot Chili Peppers to appear, but don't count out Phoenix.

New (!!!) Daft Punk album/tour coming in 2013

In what has to be the most terrifyingly exciting news we've seen in a while, French super-no-one-else-compares-to-them duo Daft Punk are finally, finally coming back.

It's been over three years since the release of their live album Alive and more than six since the duo's last studio album (not counting their work with the Tron: Legacy soundtrack). In that time, Daft Punk have earned the stellar reputation as one of the biggest and best live music spectacles in the world. Their transformative show at Coachella 2006 (their first U.S. show since 1997, at the time) and Lollapalooza 2007 were ritualistically heralded as two of the greatest festival performances of the decade - by anyone. You can go so far as to say that the current popularity wave electronica music is riding in the U.S. was all started by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, so word of a new album and tour should be bigger news than ever.

You can see in the promo graphic, March 13th of next year marks the release of No End, which was produced with help from Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder. As well, word is that the production team responsible for the iconic live pyramid in their performances will be hard at work again to make sure the new live experiences are more memorable than the last. Tour dates are sketchy, but do in fact exist. We'll likely hear more news on live performances in the near future. For now, however, just revel in the excitement. It's finally time.