How Megan Perez-Carpenter Is Shaping the Future of Equitable Festival Booking

As the lead talent buyer behind both Lightning in a Bottle and the iconic Do LaB stage at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Megan Perez-Carpenter has become one of the most influential curators shaping the modern festival landscape. From discovering emerging artists years before they break into the mainstream to intentionally pushing for more equitable festival lineups, Perez-Carpenter approaches booking with a balance of instinct, community awareness, and creative experimentation. LIANA: For people who may not realize how much work goes into creating a festival like this, what does your role actually look like day-to-day? MEGAN: My title is Senior Producer of Music and Content, which is honestly a huge umbrella. I book the music for Lightning, Woogie, and Thunder stages, curate the Crossroads crew nights, and this year I also programmed a new area called the Moon Room, which is more of an ambient late-night lounge experience. But beyond music, I oversee all the other content too — the yoga classes, workshops, family programming, art spaces, basically anything creative happening on-site touches my world in some way. We’re also a really small company, so I’m involved in everything from the initial booking conversations to contracting, advancing, and all the outward-facing communication. It’s a lot, but we really only do two major events a year, so it’s basically nonstop. LS: How early does the booking process actually start? MPC: Honestly, almost immediately. Last year I got home from the festival, unpacked, refreshed all my documents, and immediately started thinking about the next year. I already have ideas for headliner offers in my head now. As soon as I get home and get a little sleep, I’ll jump right back into it. LS: You’ve been part of LIB for a long time now. What’s that evolution been like for you personally? MPC: My first LIB was in 2011 when I was the artist relations manager, so I really grew up in this world with these people who are now basically family to me. Jesse Flemming, one of the festival owners, used to handle the music programming himself before I joined him, and now the two of us are the music team together. We do Lightning in a Bottle, but we also handle the Do LaB stage at Coachella, so it’s a really small but mighty operation. LS: There’s been a lot of conversation recently around diversity in festival booking. How do you think the industry is evolving and what still needs to improve? MPC: It’s a really big issue because the industry honestly still isn’t set up for that. I receive artist submissions from agents all the time and a lot of them are still overwhelmingly white male artists. So from the very beginning of my programming, I make equity part of the process. I track everyone I’m booking because if it’s not intentional from the beginning, you’re probably not going to achieve the result you want. I think sometimes people build an entire lineup and then realize they forgot to include women or people of color, so they try to squeeze artists in afterward. Audiences can feel when that doesn’t feel genuine. Something I’m really proud of with LIB is that I never book someone because of their identity. I book music that I genuinely love, but I’m committed to finding that music across a really wide spectrum of artists. LS: Some people assume there has to be a sacrifice in quality to create a more equitable lineup. What is your response to that? MPC: Exactly, and that’s completely untrue. Every artist on the lineup is there because they’re incredible artists. It just also happens to be a diverse lineup. A couple years ago, I actually got so frustrated that I started sending artist lists back to agents if they only included white men. I’d say, ‘Thank you for your time, but I’m not reviewing this until you add women, people of color, trans artists.’ If my goal is gender parity and you’re sending me one woman and twenty men, how am I supposed to get there? I think festival bookers need to pressure agencies more to diversify their rosters too. LS: This year especially, there’s been so much attention around the back-to-back sets at Do LaB. How did that evolve? MPC: At Lightning in a Bottle we don’t usually do a ton of back-to-backs because we don’t really have the budget for it, but at Do LaB there’s so much artist interest that I could honestly program three weekends of music. It became this really fun opportunity to experiment. Sometimes the pairings are super intentional, like when I booked Jyoty and Zack Fox together — that was a dream pairing for me. Other times it’s more spontaneous where I’m trying to fit in as many artists as possible and thinking, ‘Let’s just try this and see what happens.’ The fans really love those once-in-a-lifetime moments. Last year we had Blood Oath, which was this massive all-female collaboration set, and then the next weekend people started calling another surprise set the ‘UK Avengers.’ It creates these moments that feel really unique to the Do La