Photo by Will Deitz

Three-day passes to Lollapalooza 2013 were gone well before any lineup was announced; each individual day, up for grabs the week the bill finally surfaced, sold out in about an hour. This run on tickets isn't unique to Lolla; Coachella goes much the same way, ditto Glastonbury. But the idea that so many thousands of people are willing to roll the dice on a gigantic music festival without much clue as to what the music will actually be tells you plenty about Lolla's place in the festival world circa 2013. There's no denying people came out in the thousands for the Cure. But for just as many, it might as well be anybody up there; they came to be at Lollapalooza.

And being at Lollapalooza isn't quite what it used to be. This was Lolla's ninth year at Chicago's Grant Park, a lovely spot, but a far cry from its rep-making early days as a whistle-stop showcase for the alt-rock vanguard. In 2011, sensing an uptick in Stateside interest in dance music, Lolla smartly moved the Perry's dance stage from the main concourse to the softball fields across Columbus Dr. Ever since, Lolla's felt almost like two festivals operating half a block away. Despite the minimal distance, Perry's and Lolla proper have never felt quite as separate as they did this year.

Nine Inch Nails; photo by Will Deitz

On average, Lolla's six headliners-- the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Phoenix, the Killers, the Postal Service, and Mumford & Sons-- have been around some 17 years. Clearly, landing on the big stage at a festival Lolla's size means you've got to put some time in. But both the Cure and the Killers are well past their respective heydays. The Postal Service's lone album is 10 years old. Phoenix are coming off of this year's knotty Bankrupt!, and while Nine Inch Nails are maybe the last band of the alt-rock era with an eye still trained on the future, their stellar Friday-night set was as poorly-attended as any I've seen for a Lolla headliner. But when the youngest band at the top of your bill goes around dressing like it's 1920, you know rock'n'roll is in a curious place. Lolla's not immune to innovation on the main stage: In the last five years, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Daft Punk, and Deadmau5 have all headlined. But this year, almost anything resembling innovation seemed to be scuttled off to the sides, leaving the main stages open for varying degrees of nostalgia.

On the other hand, Perry's was a constant blur of neon, its persistent wubba beckoning the stoned immaculate. Even in passing, the feeling was intoxicating; there were few times all weekend when the deep bass pouring out of Perry's speakers didn't sound a hell of a lot more exciting than whatever was going on elsewhere. Nevermind that I'd barely heard-- let alone heard of-- 80% of the Perry's bill. Whether it was the molly, the Lime-a-Ritas, or the drop-laden "Love Sosa" remixes, the mood was free, jubilant, something you couldn't help but want to be part of. Kids who'd been standing listlessly by the main stages skipped their way towards Perry's like it was water in a desert. Groups of threes and fours would hurdle over the blanket dwellers toward the back of the lawn in anticipation of each looming dubstep drop, even though the next one would be coming along in no more than 45 seconds.

Kendrick Lamar; photo by Will Deitz

There's a certain restlessness to being at Lolla, a feeling that no matter what you're doing, you could be doing something better somewhere else. With a strict 10 p.m. cut-off, and up to six stages going at once, this feeling's more than understandable; unlike Coachella, which goes past midnight, or Bonnaroo, which pushes on until the wee hours, Lolla just packs more music into less time. If you want to see everything you'd hoped to, you've got to hustle.

It doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to chalk some of this year's harried feelings to the current fragmentation of music culture. With YouTube, Spotify and the like, a lot of the kids at Lolla have grown up scanning through music, skipping to the next song whenever the current one loses their interest. This manifests itself not only in the constant movement from stage to stage, but the quick-hit nature of the stuff coming from the speakers at Perry's: 30 seconds of a popular song, 15 seconds of bass armageddon, rinse, repeat. This is why Perry's held a crowd when so many other stages couldn't: American dubstep manages to be deeply familiar (you know "Ruff Ryders Anthem") and wildly unpredictable (but you don't know what the drop's going to sound like) all at once, a combination that works wonders on the pleasure centers while wreaking a pleasant havoc on the attention span.

At the main stages, this level of excitement was hard to come by. And when it happened, it was the up-and-comers earning the adulation. The sharp, self-effacing Ellie Goulding is a proper pop star, and it's no coincidence that her music shares quite a bit with dubstep: the loud-quiet-loud dynamics, ethereal vocals offset by deep bass hits. Elsewhere, it was a little weird seeing Kendrick Lamar's sad-eyed introspection mistaken for turn-up anthems, but the songs work almost as well stripped of their nuance as they do on the miles-deep good kid, MAAD city, and when Kendrick himself starts playing the "livest side" game with the crowd, you can't begrudge anybody hoisting their Bud Light to "Swimming Pools". L.A. sisters Haim made good on every ounce of their ballooning hype; they're funny, too, letting a "motherfucker" go every third word, then turning around and saying hello to their parents.

Haim; photo by Kirstie Shanley

Checking the schedule for this year's Lolla, I kept thinking of a comment my colleague Steven Hyden made on Twitter a few weeks back: "Nobody knows how popular anything is anymore." That never felt more true than on Sunday night, when a steady stream poured out of Vampire Weekend's very good mainstage set to catch 2 Chainz at the tucked-away Grove stage. Not that Vampire Weekend don't deserve the spotlight; they're the smartest rock band going, better all the time. But if 2 Chainz, one of the three or four most popular rappers in the world right now, isn't mainstage material, I'm not entirely sure who is. Friday afternoon, local hero Chance the Rapper was scuttled off onto the narrower BMI stage, but 20 minutes before his set, fans had absolutely swarmed the place; by the time it started, between the proximity and the pot smoke, breathing became a challenge. By all the old metrics, Chance is a nobody; he's never sold an album (intentionally, anyway), never done a big feature. But, to Chicago's 17-to-21 stoner set, he's a bona-fide star.

It seems pretty clear that, somewhere between the collapse of record sales and the advent of private listening on Spotify, it's gotten a lot trickier to gauge just how big an artist really is. A smorgasbord-style festival like Lolla's a bit deceptive, too; ads for the fest tout its low-low price per act, but when you buy your ticket, there's no telling who you're actually paying to see. Having instant access to most of the music ever made has fragmented people's taste in ways Lolla's still catching up with; there's nothing strange at all about a Vampire Weekend fan hauling ass over to Tity Boi, or a local rapper grabbing one of the festival's biggest crowds, or a bunch of DJs you mostly know from other festival posters outdrawing Nine Inch Nails. Still, it's a transition, and Lolla's only concession is excess: There's so much to see, so you'll probably like something.