World’s Biggest Music Festivals: History, Founders and Iconic Performances

Quick Answer

The festivals most often cited as the world’s biggest, by cultural influence, attendance or historical weight, are Glastonbury (founded 1970), Coachella (founded 1999), Lollapalooza (founded 1991), Tomorrowland (founded 2005), and Woodstock, the 1969 event that never repeated but still shapes how every festival on this list is discussed. Each one built its reputation differently: Glastonbury through five decades of consistency, Coachella through pop-culture spectacle, Lollapalooza through genre-mixing that didn’t exist before it, and Tomorrowland through sheer production scale.

What most roundups get wrong is treating these festivals as interchangeable “biggest festival” entries on a list. They’re not competing for the same title. Each one changed something specific about how festivals work, and knowing that history explains why they still draw the crowds they do.

Glastonbury: The Festival That Started on a Dairy Farm

Glastonbury began almost by accident. Michael Eavis, a dairy farmer in Pilton, Somerset, saw Led Zeppelin perform at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in June 1970 and decided within months that his own farm could host something similar. The first event, called the Pilton Pop, Folk and Blues Festival, took place on September 19, 1970, the day after Jimi Hendrix died. It drew 1,500 people who paid one pound each for admission, which included free camping and free milk from the farm. T. Rex headlined after the Kinks canceled, reportedly once they learned they’d be performing at a dairy farm.

The festival didn’t run continuously from there. It was renamed Glastonbury Fayre in 1971, when the first Pyramid Stage was built as a one-tenth scale replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and there was no official event again until 1979. It became a fixture from the 1980s onward, partnering with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1981 to fund the charity’s anti-nuclear proliferation work.

By the 2000s, Glastonbury had grown into what Britannica describes as the largest greenfield music festival in the world, with attendance surpassing 200,000 in recent years. The festival now takes scheduled “fallow years” roughly every five years to let the farmland recover, which is why it isn’t held every single year. 2026 is one of those fallow years, with the festival returning in 2027.

Among the performances most frequently cited as historic: David Bowie’s 2000 headline set, delivered in heavy rain and later released as a live album; Beyoncé’s 2011 headlining set, one of the first times a solo female R&B artist topped the Pyramid Stage bill; and Metallica’s 2014 headline slot, which drew attention specifically because it broke from Glastonbury’s usual guitar-pop and rock headliners into full metal territory.

Coachella: Built as the “Anti-Woodstock”

Coachella’s origin story is tied directly to a festival it was trying not to be. The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was founded by Goldenvoice’s Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen and held its first event on October 9 and 10, 1999, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, the same site it still uses today. It launched just months after Woodstock ’99, a festival remembered for fires, violence and general chaos. The Los Angeles Times’ pop critic at the time reportedly called the first Coachella the “Anti-Woodstock 99,” a comfort-focused, artistry-driven alternative to what had just happened in upstate New York.

That first Coachella headlined Beck, Tool and Rage Against the Machine, with a supporting lineup that included the Chemical Brothers, Morrissey, Pavement and Jurassic 5, drawing around 25,000 attendees. It lost an estimated $750,000 to $1 million, and organizers skipped 2000 entirely before relaunching as a one-day event in April 2001, partly to avoid the desert’s punishing October heat.

The festival’s format changed several times as it grew. It expanded to two days in 2002, three days by 2007, and in 2012 introduced the model still used today: two identical three-day weekends back to back, which effectively doubled capacity without doubling the physical footprint of the event. A landmark 2004 sellout, headlined by Radiohead and Pixies, is generally cited as the moment Coachella shifted from a risky experiment to an established institution.

The performance most associated with Coachella’s modern pop-culture status is Beyoncé’s 2018 headlining set, widely nicknamed “Beychella.” The set paid tribute to historically Black colleges and universities through a marching-band-style arrangement of her catalog, featured a Destiny’s Child reunion alongside Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, and was later released as the Netflix concert film “Homecoming.” Other frequently cited moments include Daft Punk’s 2006 pyramid-stage set and Prince’s surprise 2008 appearance during Rage Against the Machine’s set.

Lollapalooza: Born as a Farewell Tour

Lollapalooza wasn’t originally conceived as an annual festival at all. Perry Farrell, lead singer of Jane’s Addiction, created it in 1991 as a farewell tour for his own band, a multi-city run that also gave a platform to acts spanning alternative rock, punk, hip-hop and metal on the same bill, something mainstream rock tours rarely did at the time. The first tour was successful enough that it continued as an annual traveling festival through 1997, featuring artists including Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Ice Cube and the Beastie Boys across its run.

Declining ticket sales led to Lollapalooza’s cancellation in 1998, and a 2003 attempt to revive the touring format didn’t take. The festival found its permanent footing in 2005, when it relocated to Grant Park in Chicago and became an annual, fixed-location event rather than a tour, a model that’s held ever since. It has since expanded internationally, with sister editions running in cities including Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mumbai.

Lollapalooza’s lasting influence isn’t tied to one iconic performance the way Coachella’s is. Its significance is structural: it proved that a festival built around genre mixing, rather than a single scene or sound, could work commercially, a template that Coachella, Bonnaroo and most modern multi-genre festivals followed afterward.

Tomorrowland: Electronic Music at Industrial Scale

Tomorrowland is the youngest festival on this list by a wide margin, launching in 2005 in the small Belgian town of Boom. Where Glastonbury, Coachella and Lollapalooza all built their reputations gradually over decades, Tomorrowland’s growth was faster and more deliberately spectacle-driven from the start, built around elaborate, fairytale-styled stage architecture rather than a scene it emerged out of organically.

The festival is now widely cited as the largest electronic music festival in the world, with reported attendance around 400,000 across its two-weekend format. Its stage designs, redesigned nearly every year around a new theme, have become as central to its identity as any individual DJ’s set, and its production budget is frequently cited as being on a different scale than most other festivals attempt.

Tomorrowland’s headliner list draws consistently from the same tier of global EDM artists, including David Guetta, Martin Garrix and Calvin Harris, and the festival has leaned into its own mythology, using the tagline “Live Today, Love Tomorrow, Unite Forever” as a recurring theme across its marketing and stage design.

Woodstock: The Festival That Never Repeated

No history of major music festivals is complete without Woodstock, even though the original event only happened once in its intended form. Held August 15 to 18, 1969, on a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, Woodstock drew an estimated 400,000 people to a festival originally planned for a fraction of that crowd. Traffic, food and sanitation systems weren’t built to handle the turnout, and the event became less about the specific lineup and more about the scale of the crowd and what it represented culturally: a peak moment for 1960s counterculture.

Woodstock’s direct legacy is complicated. A 25th-anniversary event in 1994 and a 30th-anniversary event in 1999 both attempted to recapture it, and 1999 in particular became notorious for fires and violence rather than any musical legacy, which is part of why Coachella’s founders explicitly positioned their new festival in opposition to it a few months later. Despite that mixed legacy, Woodstock remains the reference point every major festival gets compared to when writers want to describe scale, cultural weight, or the idea of a festival as more than a concert.

How These Festivals Compare

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the oldest major music festival still running? Glastonbury, founded in 1970, is the oldest of the major festivals still operating today, though it wasn’t held continuously in its early years and takes scheduled fallow years roughly every five years.

Why did Coachella’s founders call it the “Anti-Woodstock”? The first Coachella launched just months after the chaotic Woodstock ’99, and it was deliberately positioned as a more comfort-focused, artistry-driven alternative, prioritizing lineup curation over the scale-first approach that contributed to Woodstock ’99’s problems.

Is Lollapalooza still a touring festival? No. Lollapalooza toured North America from 1991 to 1997, attempted a revival tour in 2003, and became a fixed annual festival in Chicago’s Grant Park starting in 2005. It has since added permanent international editions in several other cities.

What makes Tomorrowland different from other major festivals? Tomorrowland is built almost entirely around electronic music and is known for elaborate, frequently redesigned stage architecture and production value that’s generally considered larger in scale than most other festivals attempt.

Why isn’t Glastonbury happening every year? The festival takes scheduled fallow years, typically every five years, to allow the farmland at Worthy Farm to recover from the environmental impact of hosting hundreds of thousands of attendees.

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