Held on Michael Eavis's Worthy Farm in Somerset, England, Glastonbury Festival began in the early 1970s as a small, folk-and-hippie-adjacent gathering and has grown into one of the largest and most closely watched music festivals in the world, typically drawing well over 150,000 attendees across five days each time it runs.
A festival that takes fallow years
Unlike most major festivals, Glastonbury deliberately skips a year every so often — a "fallow year" intended to let the farmland and surrounding community recover from the physical toll of hosting an event of this scale. That rhythm is unusual in an industry built around annual, uninterrupted returns, and it's part of what keeps the festival's relationship with its host community intact after five decades.
Scale and layout
The site itself functions almost like a temporary city, with dozens of distinct stages and areas ranging from the main Pyramid Stage — reserved for the festival's biggest headline slots — down to smaller, genre-specific and even non-musical areas covering theatre, comedy, and circus performance. Navigating the full site on foot can take the better part of a day, and many attendees never see the whole festival in a single visit.
Booking philosophy
Headline slots here carry a specific cultural weight distinct from other festivals — a Glastonbury Pyramid Stage headline slot is frequently treated in UK music press as a career-defining moment, discussed and dissected for weeks afterward regardless of how the performance itself is received.
Practical notes for attendees
- Tickets sell out in minutes. The general sale is one of the most competitive ticket releases in live music, often selling out faster than tickets for any single artist's own tour.
- Weather is unpredictable. The festival's muddy years are practically their own subgenre of British festival folklore — packing for rain is close to mandatory regardless of forecast.
- The BBC broadcasts extensively. A large share of the festival is broadcast live, making it one of the more accessible major festivals for viewers who can't attend in person.
- It's genuinely multi-generational. Attendees range from teenagers to festival veterans who've been coming since the 1980s, giving it a different social atmosphere than more youth-skewed festivals.
Why it endures
Glastonbury's combination of scale, unpredictability, and a genuinely eclectic booking policy — rock, pop, hip-hop, electronic, and legacy acts all coexisting on the same bill — has kept it relevant across genre cycles that have made other long-running festivals feel dated. Search any year's headliners for their full collaboration history on IMUDB.