Cedoni Francis had a goal: get invited to Coachella to see Justin Bieber.
Ms. Francis, who is 27 and a graduate student at Columbia Business School, has been a die-hard fan of Mr. Bieber since she was a preteen in a purple bedroom — the singer’s signature color at the time — with a wall covered in posters of his swoopy-haired face.
Now a full-time content creator with over 250,000 followers on TikTok, Ms. Francis said she had previously received invitations to attend the music festival, held each spring in the Southern California desert, from brands a few months before the event. When she didn’t have any offers by March, she took matters into her own hands, posting a six-slide presentation on TikTok pitching herself and her talents, using marketing skills honed at a previous job at Google.
“I was like, OK, I just need to make my own luck in this situation,” Ms. Francis said in an interview.
It worked. On April 3, Pinterest reached out. The very next week, Ms. Francis was on her way to Indio, Calif., to attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
Or, as some call it, the “influencer Olympics.”
In the social media age, the two-weekend event — the first began on Friday — has become a hot spot for content creators, some of whom attend without ever seeing a single musical act. Brands like the fast-fashion company Revolve and Kendall Jenner’s tequila brand, 818, throw exclusive, invitation-only events at which creators clamor to see and, more crucially, be seen. A creator might drag out posting videos — from buying outfits and packing all the way to the flight home — for as much as a month to capitalize on the attention.
Attending Coachella with a brand can have a “credentialing” effect, Ms. Francis said. Working with a company like Pinterest might lead to future paid opportunities.
Shannae Ingleton Smith, chief executive of the influencer management firm Kensington Grey, said Coachella was all about “visibility.”
“Literally, if you’re not at Coachella, the rest of the world is watching,” Ms. Ingleton Smith said. “So you’re either there or you’re watching. A lot of creators end up being discovered that way.”
It’s a “rite of passage,” she said — an “I made it” moment.
Partnerships can vary widely, Ms. Ingleton Smith explained. Some creators will be offered festival tickets but be expected to pay their own way, while others will be treated to entirely free trips. Select creators will even be paid to attend, sometimes commanding six-figure appearance fees, she added.
Jasmine Gonzales, 26, a content creator who lives in Ontario, Calif., said she “never imagined” that she would be offered “the princess treatment,” her term for an all-expenses-paid invitation. This year, Ms. Gonzales is attending Coachella with the cleaning product company Method, which “rented out a mansion” for attendees to stay in, she said.
“It’s one of those bucket-list, big manifestation moments,” she said, adding that as a plus-size Latina creator, she found it especially meaningful to be recognized amid what can often feel like a sea of “perfect influencers.”
Like Ms. Francis, Jasmine Yolas, 31, a beauty content creator in Los Angeles, posted a video last month shooting her shot.
“If I was going to Coachella this year, this is exactly the makeup routine I would use,” Ms. Yolas says in the video, demonstrating various products. “Manifesting a brand coachella trip into existence,” she wrote in the caption.
No such trip appeared, but Ms. Yolas remains hopeful that one day she will get one of those coveted emails. She added that she felt Coachella had become “really competitive” for creators hoping to snag invitations and brand work.
In the weeks leading up to the festival, several influencers described on TikTok having been invited and then subsequently uninvited on brand trips to Coachella.
Ms. Francis said her manager had told her that brands had become “stingy this year,” appearing to invite fewer creators and leaning more on those with giant followings. Ms. Ingleton Smith, the influencer management executive, chalked it up to “Coachella fatigue.”
“Brands have picked up on how thirsty creators are to go to Coachella: They’re realizing they don’t have to pay them,” she said. “That has made some of the paid partnerships fewer and farther between.”
Some creators see the festival as an investment, Ms. Ingleton Smith said, and will pay for trips to California in the hopes it will help them secure work once there.
Katie Begley, a content creator better known as Popstar Katie, posted a TikTok in which she laid out her plans for such a trip. She bought her flights, a brand provided her festival tickets and she worked with her management team to secure paid brand deals. As of just a few days before the festival began, she was still looking for a place to stay.
“I don’t want it to look like to you guys that I just like, ‘Oh, I’m showing up and everything’s perfect,’” she said in the video.
Still, some decide it is worth the effort and cost to be on the festival grounds where it happens.
Cathie O’Brien, a human resources professional and an upstart content creator in Minneapolis, knows that better than anyone. Ms. O’Brien, 27, has only about 25,000 followers on TikTok, so she was surprised earlier this spring when she received an invitation to attend Camp Poosh, a wellness retreat hosted by Kourtney Kardashian Barker during Coachella.
It’s a coveted ticket, Ms. O’Brien said in an interview last week. She was “over the moon,” until she realized the invitation was addressed to a different influencer with a larger following. When Ms. O’Brien responded to the email noting the mistake, she was told to disregard the invitation.
After Ms. O’Brien posted about the experience online, Camp Poosh reached back out to invite her and a guest to attend. While she has received comments from people accusing her of attention seeking and being offered a sympathy invite, Ms. O’Brien said she was ignoring the criticism and choosing to make the most of the moment. She and a friend ended up traveling to Indio solely for the event; they do not have tickets to Coachella.
While it’s a party, it’s also a networking event for Ms. O’Brien.
“I will totally be annoying,” she said with a laugh. “I will be that girl asking them for their email so I can like follow up with them, you know, after the weekend.”
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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