A music festival is a gathering that is called when a musician, band or group of musicians or bands are performing live at a particular venue at a particular time in a particular time interval. There is a shared sense of joy when it comes to listening to your favourite artist live with many other people physically present at the same time. Music festivals are usually conducted in stadiums such as the Spectrum Center or grand auditoriums. They may be conducted indoors or outdoors depending on the weather condition and the number of people attending. It may also be conducted during morning or at night, depending on the country or place you are in.
Hippie style clothing and ideals of the counterculture of the 1960s are more often than not associated with music festivals. This is mainly because music festivals started out during the hippie movement and therefore trends like flowing shirts, fringe boots and purses, flower headbands and graphic t-shirts with logos and designs from those counter culture related bands such as The Grateful Dead are coming back in style. Several famous clothing companies like Forever 21 and Billabong capitalized on this fashion and created clothing lines for such festivals. Forever 21 even took it a step further and created a clothing line just from the Coachella Music Festival.
The Impact of Music Festivals on The Counterculture Movement
The music festival was not just about the music. Think about it: a group of impressionable minds coming together under one roof. This was the perfect place for business. People would come with friends with all the money they had. They were in no way trying to save money either. Overpriced food, over priced tickets, overpriced souveneigners, everything was grossly overpriced and yet, people still bought everything. Because people did no care.
This had a bigger impact back in the 1960s when it started out. This was the generation of the baby boomers: babies that were born when the war had ended and all the people were reunited with their loved ones back home. There was a big increase in the young population. When this generation hit their late teens a lot of things were going on: communism, the Vietnam war, civil rights movements, and much much more. There were a lot of songs that depicted these in a very humane light, softening the impact of them while making it understandable for the youth. This led to the growth of several counterculture movements, notable ones being anarchy, maoism, the hippie movement etc. These groups would later change the ideals over time and become more and more unstable, but they all once started in an auditorium, singing pop songs from the 60s.