The similarities don't end there; for another example, both events appreciate the value of giving something back. The rodeo will award more than $12 million in scholarships this year, plus millions more in graduate assistantships and educational grants. Coachella funnels a portion of its box-office take to a list of about ten charities, including the City of Indio, Coachella Valley Community Trust, Martha's Village, and the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.
Finally, the engine driving both is youth. It's a given that Coachella will be overrun with high-schoolers and twentysomethings. Most music festivals are almost by nature, but this might surprise you: according to the rodeo, whose exhaustive market research borders on the census-like, the percentage of attendees under 25 years of age varies year to year, but hovers right around 35 percent.
That means one in three people at Reliant Park between March 4 and 23 this year will have been born after March 1989. Hundreds of thousands of them, enough children of the smartphone age to drive the rodeo into Facebook's Top 10 most checked-in locations last year, not far away from Fenway Park and Universal Studios Hollywood.
But the greatest similarity of all is pretty simple: both organizations have placed fans front and center, and reaped the benefits handsomely. Although Rocks Off feels like we should point out that we don't see Coachella anywhere on that Facebook check-in list.
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