The financial scale of Desert Trip has raised eyebrows throughout the industry. Tickets range from $199 for general admission on a single day to $1,599, the highest tier for weekend passes to one of 35,000 assigned seats. On average, attendees will spend more than $1,000 each — a remarkable sum given that the average ticket price to the top 100 tours in North America is about $75, according to Pollstar.

“Whatever ceiling there was in the concert business in terms of economics just got blown out of the water,” said Marc Geiger, the head of music at the William Morris Endeavor agency.

Satisfying an affluent crowd that skews toward middle age has become one of the promoters’ main concerns. There is an extensive menu of high-end food, including a $225 four-course meal by chefs like Dominique Ansel and Marcus Samuelsson, and an afternoon-long, all-you-can-eat “culinary experience” for $179. Mr. Tollett said that he and his team had been laboring over logistics to minimize patrons’ time waiting in line, and spent months scouring the region for more than 1,000 flushable toilets.

“We pretty much wiped out everything into Texas,” Mr. Tollett said of the hunt for rentable restroom trailers, which will supplement the more than 300 toilets already on the site.

When asked about the demographics for the show, Mr. Tollett said that all ages were expected, but acknowledged that the crowd would lean heavily toward the baby boomer generation. The festival’s own marketing videos illustrate this, with gray-haired revelers feasting on gourmet food and dancing in the pastel light of the desert dusk.

Older fans represent a steady portion of the concert audience, but have been an afterthought for festivals, which have become the concert industry’s fastest-growing area since Coachella’s arrival in 1999. That matches a wider blind spot in entertainment media about older consumers, said Robert Love, editor in chief of AARP The Magazine and a former editor at Rolling Stone.