Coachella turns 20 years old in 2019 while also celebrating its 20th anniversary.

It skipped one year in 2000 due to financial difficulties. But the music festival has been doing just fine since those early growing pains, thank you very much.

Coachella was named best outdoor music festival in North America by industry watchdog Pollstar in its inaugural year, and it has repeated that honor 12 times, including earlier this year when it regained its title after losing the award in 2017 to Desert Trip, which was also produced by Goldenvoice.

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Here's a look back at some of the highlights from the first 19 years of Coachella, which takes place April 12-14 and April 19-21 this year:

1999: L.A. music promoter, Goldenvoice, brings a mix of indie rock, hip-hop and electronic music to the Empire Polo Field in Indio on a hot October weekend, following the belief of founders Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen that a combination of niche audiences for music unable to get on pop radio will attract the 70,000 people they need to turn a profit with just $50 daily admission fees. Somehow, the vast variety of music unites this alternative nation. They delight in seeing Beck dance, Rage Against the Machine combust, the Chemical Brothers roar and Moby mix electronics with old gospel and field music. Coachella distinguishes itself from the the disastrous Woodstock festival of a few months earlier and reinvents music festivals. Unfortunately, only 37,000 people show up and the promoters must sell their homes and cars to save their company. Coachella must go dark for a year before Goldenvoice can re-create its dream festival.

2001: The festival returns as a one-day event in mid-April and Jane's Addiction establishes the tradition of band reunions. This Perry Farrell-led group arguably saves the festival by playing an elaborate headlining set for a deferred paycheck because Goldenvoice couldn't afford a marquee band after losing more than $800,000 in 1999. Weezer and the Dandy Warhols are other highlights of the shortest Coachella in history.

2002: The festival returns for two days with Bjork and Oasis as headliners following a new partnership formed with concert conglomerate AEG Live. Dave Grohl drives the Foo Fighters on guitar and Queens of the Stone Age on drums in a rare double appearance. His aggressive work with QOTSA makes Josh Homme's hometown appearance a triumph while realizing the potential Rolling Stone saw in the band when it called them "one of the next big things in hard rock."

2003: The Beastie Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers headline a bill that helps put Coachella on solid footing. Rock rules with the return of Queens of the Stone Age and the White Stripes. Iggy Pop reunites with the Stooges after a 28-year break and they sound remarkably muscular. "Having disbanded before their influence was fully disseminated," said FUSE TV, "Iggy and the Asheton Brothers played to an audience that held them in reverential awe." An awe-struck Homme says Iggy resembles "a rusty wire," portending to a collaboration more than a decade away.

2004: Coachella becomes an international institution as attendance almost doubles to 120,000. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips creates a visual image that becomes Coachella's brand. The frontman steps inside a giant, transparent ball and rolls over the heads of the crowd near the main stage. The gimmick elevates Flaming Lips' stature, adding them to buzz generated by such other festival sensations as The Cure and Radiohead, who say they're thrilled to follow the reunited Pixies. Going relatively unnoticed in a daytime slot are The Killers. But that begins a process of nurturing the Las Vegas band to their eventual headliner status. Sadly, co-founder Van Santen dies of a heroin overdose just months before Coachella's breakthrough success.

2005: Trent Reznor revitalizes Nine Inch Nails in a Sunday headliner show. After well-documented struggles with drugs and alcohol, a sober Reznor reveals he can still conjure the rage that made him one of the most important performers of the 1990s. NIN overwhelms Coldplay's Saturday headline set. The most surprising performance is Arcade Fire on the second stage, generating a sing-along to "Wake Up" that rivals the Pixies' version of "Where Is My Mind" in 2004. Joshua Tree band Gram Rabbit performs an engaging daytime set that inspires people to wear rabbit ears for the rest of the day.

2006: Daft Punk takes EDM to new heights with an LED pyramid that is a historic meshing of music and visual art. Billboard critics and coachella.com fans name it the best show in Coachella history. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame calls it one of the 20 greatest festival moments ever. "At Coachella, we lost our virginity again," says Daft Punk member Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo. On the other end of the spectrum, Madonna arrives late and performs a half-hour set of dance-pop music, defining what Coachella is not. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Palm Desert's Imad Waasif on guitar, show what Coachella is with an electro-rock set that gives Massive Attack a hard act to follow late Sunday. Eagles of Death Metal also do Palm Desert proud with Homme on drums. Going under the radar during the day are Sia and the Arctic Monkeys.

2007: Coachella expands to three days and box office revenue jumps from $9 million to $16.3 million. Rage Against the Machine reunites and gives an incendiary performance. Bonfires literally break out throughout the massive closing night audience. Frontman Zack de la Rocha rails that the George W. Bush administration should be dealt with "as any war criminal should be." Paste and Crave Online prefers Rage's first Coachella show, but the Rage set is definitely a festival highlight. KROQ DJs call it one of the five best Coachella shows ever. Billboard ranks it No. 2. Arcade Fire and DJ Tiesto on the main stage almost overwhelm the Saturday main bill, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Bjork becomes the last female headliner until 2017, but actress Scarlett Johansson makes a memorable drop-in performance with the Jesus and Mary Chain.

2008: Coachella experiences its last financially challenging year. Prince is added to the lineup late after Roger Waters, Jack Johnson and Portishead fail to sell it out. The Purple One brings a full Minneapolis posse and astonishes the crowd with a dramatic interpretation of Radiohead's "Creep," proving radio superstars are not only needed for box office revenue, they can take Coachella to another level. Revenue and attendance drop from 2007, and Prince's hefty price tag reportedly puts the festival in the red. But Prince tells the crowd, "You are in the coolest place on Earth," and that reverberates digitally. Waters' set playing both "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall," with a female violinist playing the absent David Gilmour's guitar solo on "Comfortably Numb" – hair flying in the wind – adds to Coachella's legend. "Small-font" acts like Vampire Weekend, Deadmau5 and MGMT prove Tollett can still find great new talent.

2009: Goldenvoice doesn't hesitate to abandon its reputation as a niche festival when Tollett gets the opportunity to book Paul McCartney after an appearance at an AEG Live venue in Las Vegas. McCartney covers most of the Beatles' catalogue but two of his most moving numbers come from after the 1960s: The emotional "My Love," performed on the 11th anniversary of his wife, Linda's death, and "Here Today," featuring a dialogue he wrote after the murder of John Lennon. This Coachella makes McCartney a huge fan of the festival and he returns in subsequent years to visit or give surprise DJ sets. Attendance only inches above that of 2008, but The Killers are turned into headliners and The Black Keys, Fleet Foxes and TV On the Radio climb the poster to bigger fonts. Highlights also are provided by Leonard Cohen and Morrissey.

2010: Jay-Z becomes the first hip-hop artist to headline and Coachella sets box office and attendance records with sell-out crowds of 75,000 a day – even though Goldenvoice sells only three-day passes for the first time. Jay-Z performs a plethora of hits, but escalates his performance exponentially by bringing out Beyoncé for a rare duet of "Young Forever." Homme returns to the main stage with his Grammy Award-winning super group, Them Crooked Vultures, and kills as bassist John Paul Jones says Grohl's drumming reminds him of playing in Led Zeppelin. Sly & the Family Stone reunite for Coachella's most disastrous reunion ever, as Sly Stone falls off his swivel chair. But younger acts, such as Sia, Vampire Weekend and MGMT, move up on the poster. Art becomes more important as Goldenvoice, under second-year art curator Paul Clemente, emphasizes commissioning works over renting them from sites such as Burning Man.

2011: Arcade Fire rises to Coachella headliner. The band had just released its most ambitious album, "The Suburbs," which won the Best Album Grammy a month earlier, and they play it while releasing a torrent of inflatable balls into the audience. Frontman Win Butler says humbly, "If you had told me in 2002 we'd be playing Coachella with Animal Collective playing before us, I'd have told you you were full of (crap)." Kanye West and The Strokes share the Sunday headlining slot, but West is clearly on the ascent, appearing with an ambitious production, while The Strokes may have peaked. Mumford & Sons shows there's even room for modern folk music at Coachella but the Sahara tent is proving how popular electronic music is becoming.

2012: Coachella expands to two weekends and Dr. Dre, receiving a bundle of money for a late request to appear as a headliner, creates music history. Conjuring the ghost of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg trades verses with a hologram of Tupac and the reverberations are so monstrous, people almost forget that Eminem is one of the many guest artists in the set. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame calls it one of the 20 greatest festival moments ever. The buzz is magnified as the media speculates between the two weekends if the "trio" will be able to pull of a return engagement for the second Coachella. They do and even Radiohead's Saturday headlining performance is overshadowed by it. With the extra weekend, gross revenues almost double to $47.3 million. Fashions reflect the growing affluence of the audience.

2013: The buzz over the Tupac hologram has a significant sales impact as the Coachella lineup sells out quickly and increases box office revenue by $20 million despite a weak headline slate of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Phoenix and the alternating opening nighters, The Stone Roses and Blur. The Wu-Tang Clan reunites RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God and Masta Killa for a historic 20-year reunion on the Outdoor Stage that outshines the Chili Peppers on the main Coachella Stage. Backed by a full orchestra, the Wu brings new energy to '90s classics like "Protect Ya Neck," "Bring the Pain" and "C.R.E.A.M." for a crowd stretched four football fields deep. This also is the year art becomes as talked-about as the music as a giant caterpillar created by Poetic Kinetics crawls throughout the festival grounds.

2014: Coachella gets a new brand image with the appearance of Poetic Kinetics giant spaceman, called Escape Velocity. Outkast proves to be a disappointing opening night headliner, but improves the second weekend after a week-long buzz over the Outdoor Theatre performance by Pharrell and his many surprise guest artists. Rapper T.I. performs verses with him from Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines", Clipse and Pusha T join him on stage for "Grindin'", R&B superstar Usher sings the Pharrell-penned "U Don't Have to Call," and the now Coachella favorite Jay-Z lights up the stage with a performance of "Excuse Me Miss." Arcade Fire delivers another great performance, capping it by going over curfew and having their amplifiers shut down, and just marching out into the crowd performing acoustically. Gross revenues jump another $11 million.

2015: Canadian rapper Drake is a surprise headliner, despite his many No. 1 singles, and he proves unprepared for the large stage in front of such a massive number of people. Consequence of Sound calls him the worst headliner in Coachella history. Madonna makes a seemingly surprise appearance that even Drake says is weird. AC/DC and Jack White bring dynamic headline sets. Steely Dan proves old rockers can satisfy a younger audience, and Florence + the Machine appears headliner ready even after Florence Welch breaks an ankle. Rock's era as Coachella's dominant music is almost over, but the composition of audience seems unchanged. The first weekend is more star and hipster-oriented, but Coachella has become as much of a star as the acts.

2016: Tollett reunites Guns N' Roses in what might be his greatest feat. Axl Rose couldn't be depended upon to show up with Slash even when they were getting along. Now Rose has a broken leg and is confined to a mobile "throne" given to him before the festival by Grohl. But the band rocks. Still, this festival represents electronic music's dominance. Calvin Harris sets an unofficial attendance record for a single act while Coachella sets a box office record with sales of $84.2 million. Also significant are electronic artists Flume, Major Lazer and Underworld. Sia, who purchased a home in Palm Springs and got married there, creates another highlight in her first appearance on the big stage with a set that is called half-concert, half-performance art.

2017: With Tollett having purchased the Eldorado Polo Club next door to the Empire Polo Club, plus considerable property around the neighborhood, the festival venue has now mitigated much of its overcrowding problems and the city of Indio allows Coachella to expand from 99,000 people a day to 125,000. Box office revenues grow to a whopping $114.6 million, according to Billboard, which honors Coachella as its top festival for the seventh year in a row. Much more is coming in with the expanded culinary offerings. Musically, Kendrick Lamar lives up to expectations as the Sunday headliner, but Lady Gaga exceeds them as a replacement for Beyoncé, who announces soon after the lineup is announced that she is postponing her appearance for a year due to her pregnancy with twins. Parts of Gaga's performance winds up in "A Star Is Born."

2018: It is the year of Beyoncé. The R&B star appears on stage in Queen Nefertiti attire and lives up to her nickname, Queen B. She is the first black female headliner at Coachella and she turns her set into a coronation unlike anything since Michael Jackson was alive. She brings a marching band, a chorus line and drum line, and they all dance like pros. She sings the early 20th century black anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," before her own anthem, "Formation." She brings out her husband, Jay-Z, her sister, Solange, and her old trio, Destiny's Child, for a major reunion at a festival that treasures them. Other highlights: Cardi B performing with abandon despite being pregnant; Portugal. The Man playing its biggest hit, "Feel It Still," after warning "Your parents will like the next song," and David Byrne displaying the quirkiness of Talking Heads. The festival also features a tower cemented into the polo fields that offers different perspectives of Coachella as visitors peer through filtered glass while walking to the top. The message is clear that Coachella is a constantly changing work of massive art.