Indio, California - The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is the NFT hype-train's next stop, with non-fungible (unique) lifetime passes to the event now available to buy.

According to the Coachella NFT website, the lifetime passes, called Coachella Keys, are dropping on February 4.

But not all NFT Coachella Keys are created equal.

There are some that only give you lifetime access to Coachella, all-inclusive food and drink, private transportation, and the vague promise of "future virtual adventures."

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Then there are the serious luxury Keys, which give you access to VIP seating for the music, a private party, or even a fully-stocked VIP trailer.

The Keys will be on auction for a week, which means that instead of scalpers reselling tickets, the festival itself wants a piece of that price-jacking action. Scalpers can still do their thing, though, because the terms of use don't prohibit reselling the keys.

So, as soon as the auction is over, you can expect the keys to switch hands often before April 1st, which is when Key owners have to verify their ownership in order to receive their physical Coachella festival pass and benefits each year.

But the Coachella Keys are just the headliner NFTs.

You can also pay between $60 and $180 to generate a random collection of festival images, which you can then redeem for a physical art print, instead of just generating a randomized print.

There are a lot of questions that come to mind here.

Non-Fungible Tokens are not digital content, they are just a contract confirming that you own a piece of digital content.

But, just like anything online, you are up a creek without a paddle if the service that hosts your NFT goes down.

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This applies to the Coachella Keys, too, and the company behind the festival, Goldenvoice, LLC, explicitly states that the Keys are only good as long as it runs the festival.

That is a huge red flag, because it means the Keys could easily outlive the company that would redeem them, making them worthless.

Then there are the climate concerns surrounding NFTs, which are created and stored on blockchain technology, which is the same tech used to mine and transfer cryptocurrencies.

Any cryptocurrency that needs mining rigs to verify its transactions, which include creating and trading NFTs, has a negative impact on the environment, thanks to the country-sized energy requirements for powering those transactions.

Coachella's NFTs are on the Solana blockchain, which claimed in December 2021 that it is "carbon-neutral", but just like tech companies claiming 100% renewable electricity use, this is misleading. Solana only manages to be carbon-neutral because it buys carbon offsets, so, for now, this blockchain is still bad for the environment.

Then there are the huge number of copyright infringements, where scammers steal artists' work, turn them into NFTs, and sell them, which Twitter account @NFTtheft works to document.

To top it off, NFTs don't do anything new, or solve problems more efficiently, which is made perfectly clear when you buy a "lifetime pass" to Coachella festivals but still need to get a physical ticket each year.

Ultimately, was there really no way to sell some sort of lifetime ticket to Coachella until NFTs came along?