Changes

By the late 1960s, Rock bands and promoters began to organize their own music festivals. Perhaps the first formal and well known dedicated festival to Rock was the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, which featured the Who and brought that band to the attention of American audiences. Another early festival was the Isle of Wight festival, in 1968, which started as an event with about 10,000 people and featured Jefferson Airplane, Pretty Things, and Arthur Brown among its performers. By 1970, the festival grew to bring in more than 600,000 people, showing the popularity of music festivals to organizers and causing many others to begin to imitate these events where multiple, often well-known bands would come and perform. The Summerfest festival was established in 1968, but it focused not only on music but other events and was spread out across the city of Milwaukee. Interestingly, Summerfest made cities realized that music and other festivals can be major revenue generators, particularly for struggling city budgets. This helped to spread the idea of creating not only musical festivals sponsored by cities but also other types of festivals, such as those dedicated to food and film.

What perhaps put music festivals on the map and made Rock music festivals known to many Americans and Europeans was Woodstock in 1969, which featured many well-known bands and artists, including the Who and Jimi Hendrix, and drew hundreds of thousands of people, making it the first large-scale Rock music festival. It was billed as "three days of love and peace," making it the ultimate symbol of the 1960s counter-culture movement. Interestingly, the festival almost never happened, as the governor of New York, Nelson Rockerfeller, threatened to send in the National Guard to stop the festival from taking place, where many of the locals in upstate New York did not feel it was appropriate to have such an event. In 1970, a documentary with the same name as the festival was released, which further popularized the event and encapsulated to many Americans what the late 1960s and early 1970s Rock culture represented. Throughout the early 1970s, open-air concerts became more popular, with Led Zepplin among bands preferring such venues. This gave the idea to hold other music, mainly Rock, festivals, with Glastonbury being established in 1970 and, along with the Isle of Wight Festival, among the first in the UK focused on Rock. The hippie movement did much to influence music festivals in the 1970s, sometimes crashing events, or simply bringing large crowds to events. Many of the large music festivals today, such as Isle of Wight and Summerfest, originated from the late 1960s and early 1970s.