Woodstock

Woodstock set the gold standard for music festivals as a cultural watershed, drawing 400,000 people to a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, in August 1969. Its three-day lineup, headlined by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane, attracted over twice the attendance of Lollapalooza's 400,000 over four days. The festival remains the defining symbol of the 1960s counterculture movement — a moment when music became a force for social change, with no riots or violence reported among the massive crowd, cementing its legacy as the most iconic gathering in festival history.