History of Music Festivals: Part 2

 

 

In my last post we discovered that festivals of music have been a part of society for 1000of years. Below ill cover how the modern music festival really formed. Music festival popularity really sky rocketed in America in the late 1900's with festivals such Wisconsin's 11-day event, Summerfest, which promotes itself as "The World's Largest Music Festival", a title certified by the Guinness World Records and held since 1999. Operating annually since 1968, the festival attracts between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people each year, and hosts over 800 musical acts. The Woodstock Festival in 1969 drew nearly 500,000 attendees, and the Polish spin-off Przystanek Woodstock drew 700,000 in 2011. The largest annual greenfield music festival in the world is Roskilde Festival in Denmark which attracts approximately 135,000 spectators. Each year Glastonbury Festival has a capacity of about 175,000 spectators, but has "fallow years" roughly every 5 years, thereby making it the biggest non-annual greenfield festival in the world. The oldest annual dedicated pop Music Festival in the world is Pinkpop Festival in the Netherlands, though in other genres, there are much older ones — the Three Choirs Festival in the UK has run annually since 1719. As you can see there are many festivals, in different countries, with different people and different music. There are so many in fact, im sure there is one somewhere in the world that is perfect for YOU.