Tollett passed Pete Townshend’s guitars, arranged in the order that he would soon require them, and finally moved toward the vast inland sea of people he had drawn to the shell valley. He was stopped by security personnel, who correctly identified him as an overzealous fan.

On the day after New Year’s, Tollett was in an A.E.G. Presents boardroom in downtown L.A., finalizing the 2017 Coachella poster, which announced this year’s lineup and was due to be released the following day. Tollett, his two partners, Skip Paige and Bill Fold, and a staff of a dozen were sitting at the boardroom table, each with a laptop. A black L.A. Kings cap, the hockey team owned by A.E.G., had seasonally replaced the Dodgers cap on Tollett’s head. Tollett may be the great impresario of our time, but he looks as if he’s there to pack up the gear.

On the poster were the headliners for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: Radiohead, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar, respectively, each of whom would receive between three and four million dollars for playing. Below them were seven lines of artist and band names. The first line noted the reunions (New Order), the critical darlings (Bon Iver, Father John Misty), and the biggest E.D.M. (electronic dance music) d.j.s; the font for the second, third, and fourth lines became progressively smaller, allowing more artists to be listed. The lowest three lines were all the same size. Some of those acts make less than ten thousand dollars.

In addition to curating the lineup, Tollett had booked the hundred and fifty acts himself, negotiating all the offers with agents—a six-month process. He also fielded a lot of pitches that he had to turn down. Geiger, of W.M.E., described their working method: “I’ll say, ‘Kate Bush!’ And he’ll go, ‘No!,’ and we’ll talk through it. I’ll say, ‘She’s never played here, and she just did thirty shows in the U.K. for the first time since the late seventies. You gotta do it! Have to!’ ‘No! No one is going to understand it.’ ”

Tollett has a knack for big statements—this year he was leaning heavily on Beyoncé, who was a deeper dive into pop for Coachella—but he also wants his first-time bookings, with an audience of only two hundred on Gobi, the smallest stage, to have the show of their lives. Coachella is a delicate ecosystem of the grand and the intimate. Tollett creates the biosphere that sustains it.

Goldenvoice tries to release the Coachella poster as close as possible to New Year’s Day. Even though the mid-April festival is still three and a half months away at that point (it begins this Friday), there is an advantage to announcing first in the increasingly competitive festival calendar, especially since the other big festivals—Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, Electric Daisy Carnival, Lollapalooza—are likely to have many of the same headliners. The release is closely scrutinized on social media. Bonnie Marquez, Goldenvoice’s director of marketing, told me, “Typically, Facebook is more negative than Instagram.” Gopi Sangha, the company’s digital director, observed, “Reddit, you get the very analytical people. Your thinkers.”

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In theory, the purpose of the poster is promotional, but the 2017 show promised to sell out regardless of who was in it. Although Coachella lost money on its 1999 début, nearly bankrupting Goldenvoice, and required four years to become profitable, by 2011 the festival had grown so popular that Tollett offered a second weekend, with the same lineup. (“What’s better than Coachella?,” as he put it to his skeptical partners. “Two Coachellas.”) About three-quarters of the tickets for this year’s shows were sold in advance, to allow fans to pay in installments. When the rest went on sale, the day after the lineup’s release, they were gone within two hours, leaving more than a quarter of a million unhappy people waiting in the queue.

For artists, placement on the poster translates directly into booking fees. “Agents will say, ‘They’re a second-line band at Coachella!’ ” Tollett related. Rarely has typography been so closely monetized. For E.D.M. d.j.s, in particular, placement on the poster can determine their future asking price, not only in the United States but internationally. “We have so many arguments over font sizes,” he went on. “I literally have gone to the mat over one point size.”

“Today is the day I’m telling all the agents what line their band is going to be on,” Tollett explained. “Sounds like a small thing in the great scheme of life. But, as it relates to these bands, it’s huge.” He added, “We booked it, and it’s going to be great.” He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.

A prototype of the poster was on the table. He pointed to the second line, Saturday, where two popular E.D.M. d.j.s, DJ Snake and Martin Garrix, and the hip-hop m.c. SchoolBoy Q, were all together, along with the alternative-rock star Bon Iver and the Atlanta rappers Gucci Mane and Future.

“I have a pileup of d.j.s here,” Tollett said. “The problem is that every one of them wants there.” He tapped the left side of the line, where Bon Iver held pride of place. “In the old days, you could look at SoundScan or Pollstar. Who sells more records? Who sells more tickets? But d.j.s don’t do concerts. And these hip-hop guys—some of them play only raves and large dance-club events,” so-called “soft ticket” shows in which the artist is just one part of the package. Instead of hard numbers, the d.j.s use social-media-based metrics to measure their popularity: Facebook friends, Twitter followers, YouTube views.

“The third line is the hardest,” Tollett went on, adjusting his Kings cap. “With someone like Justice or New Order, you know they’re solid.” The French techno group and the British New Wave band were two of the occupants of Sunday’s second line. “Marshmello?”—a third-line masked E.D.M. d.j. whose identity is concealed beneath a buckethead with a blitzed-looking emoji for a face. “Could be a line two, because he has crazy statistics,” Tollett said as he drummed on the poster with a pencil eraser.

“Twenty years ago, alternative artists grew slower,” he continued. “But there is no underground anymore. It’s all kind of pop, in a way, and it goes up quickly because of SoundCloud. Some of these artists get stats over a six-week period that are just crazy. I make an offer for small bands, and in six months the world can change for them so much. Or you buy them at their peak and their numbers are dropping off each day. It’s like gambling. Going short, going long. We’re going long on Marshmello.”

Tollett knew that he was showing his age by continuing to headline rock bands like Radiohead, when the kids would rather see the E.D.M. shows in Sahara and Mojave, the big tents. “When you take an indie-rock band, five or six members, not everyone is on the E-flat seventh at the same time, so it doesn’t sound perfect,” he said. “With electronic music, it’s pre-programmed, so it sounds flawless. There are no mistakes. There’s a generation that’s used to flawless, and when they don’t hear flawless it may suck to them.”

Tollett’s laptop showed Coachella’s six stages, represented by different colors in Excel, for the noon-to-midnight slots for each of the three days. (The schedule would be released later.) The shading deepened with the hour. “Everyone wants to play in the dark, so they can use their full production,” Tollett continued. “But not everyone is going to get dark. And not everyone needs dark.” The cross-dressing indie rocker Ezra Furman, who is an observant Jew, needed to be in a synagogue by sundown on Friday, and Saturday was obviously out.