About midway through her Friday night set at Coachella in Indio, California, Lady Gaga declared that—as a romantic gesture to the crowd—she “decided to build you an opera house in the desert.”
And she had, complete with Roman columns, a giant sandbox, a giant-er chess board, and all the drama of Madama Butterfly. Dancing around her grand, gothic set for almost two hours, belting out everything from classics like “Bad Romance” to new tracks like “Abracadabra,” Gaga kept her monsters roaring.
About 7,500 miles from the stage on which Gaga was triggering an alarming number of flashbacks to the Saturday nights of my early twenties, the star had also built an opera house on a 75-inch flatscreen in my living room in Sydney, Australia.
More people than ever are tuning into YouTube’s Coachella livestream from different corners of the world, with non-U.S. viewership on the festival’s official channel doubling between 2019 and 2024. And this year, I decided to join them. The lineup looked amazing (Jimmy Eat World? Be still my Millennial heart!) and YouTube is offering a bunch of new ways to engage, like vertical livestreams and Watch With, where you can watch sets along with some of your favorite creators.
