This is the biggest music festival of all time
23 April 2023, 16:00 | Updated: 17 April 2024, 11:35
Gigs with thousands of people are back in earnest in the summer of 2022, but here's a festival that had an audience of millions!
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
What, would you say, was the biggest music festival ever held?
Glastonbury before the wall went up? One of the massive free festivals in the 1960s, maybe? Something ridiculously large in South America perhaps?
The answer is none of the above.
There has been a music festival that bought in a crowd so enormous, it actually broke a Guinness World Record.
The festival in question was Austria's Donauinselfest - the Danube Island Festival - which was held in Vienna between 26 and 28 June 2015.
The three day event attracted an unbelievable crowd of 3.3 million people!
The festival is held on Donauinsel, which is a 13-mile island in the centre of Vienna in Austria. The festival site itself takes up 4 miles and is broken up into several areas that play host to over 2,000 artists. There are 13 stages and 17 themed areas.
Das war das Donauinselfest 2015
While other events can boast a larger attendance, Donauinsel is the largest open air festival in one single location, as opposed to a collection of venues across a town or city.
And the most amazing thing is that Donauinsel is FREE. It's organised by Austria's Social Democratic Party, which is a bit like the LibDems putting on Glastonbury.
The event had notched up 3.2 million people in 2013, but went on to break the record two years later when, according to Guinness World Records, 1.1 million people attended on the Friday, 1.3 million on Saturday and 1 million on Sunday.
Imagine the queue for the toilets.
All the people were there to see the likes of Natalie Imbruglia, Anastacia, Taio Cruz and hundreds of DJs and other bands and artists.
One of the other main attractions is the Rock The Island contest, which sees unsigned artists compete for a slot on the prestigious main stage.
Donauinselfest returns in 2024 between 21st and 23rd June.
