The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is the top music festival in the world, according to Billboard, grossing $67.2 million and attracting 180,000 people in 2013 over the course of two weekends. It’s also an elite experience for the affluent, with an expensive admission fee and amenities that include a furnished “Shikar style tent” with electrical outlets and two queen-sized beds at a cost of $6,500. I’ve been fully immersed in Coachella. I’ve discovered artists such as Haim and ASAP Ferg, re-kindled my love affair with the music of the Cult, and enjoyed the long-awaited OutKast reunion (warts and all).

Oh, and I’ve not even left my home in the Midwest hinterlands.

My new SlideShare, which contains detailed speaker notes, discusses how Coachella creates a digital community for people like me (especially via a YouTube livestream) without compromising the appeal in-person event. As it turns out, digital creates a powerful network of brand ambassadors for Coachella.

Coachella offers a lesson on how marketers can make an exclusive brand a bit more accessible without damaging your mystique. Luxury brands wrestle with this issue all the time especially as they court younger audiences who are on the cusp of being affluent.

On the surface, Coachella may look anything but exclusionary, especially when you consider that being there in person involves swimming a sea of dirty, writhing bodies baking in the hot desert sun. But Coachella is a luxury. As Todd Martens and Mikal Wood noted recently in the Los Angeles Times, “Coachella is now more like a spring break weekend at a walled-off resort than an edgy music festival.”

Like Louis Vuitton, Coachella has aggressively employed digital to make its brand more accessible to wannabes like me who stand on the outside looking in with our noses pressed against the glass. Check out my SlideShare to learn more. And if you attend Coachella, tell me what you think of the event.