Wacken Festival

Wacken Open Air
The logo of the Wacken Open Air festival is a bull head Skull
Genre	Heavy metal, hard rock and all its sub-genres
Dates	July, August
Location(s)	Wacken, Germany
Years active	1990–present
Founded by	Thomas Jensen and Holger Hübner
Website
wacken.com

Wacken Open Air (W:O:A) is a summer open-air heavy metal music festival. It takes place annually in the village of Wacken in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, 80 kilometres (50 mi) northwest of Hamburg.

The festival was first held in 1990 as a small event for local German bands. W:O:A is usually held at the beginning of August and lasts four days. It is currently considered the biggest heavy-metal festival in the world. In 2011, the festival attracted 80,000 festival visitors and 6,000 personnel for a total of roughly 86,000 attendees.

The festival traditionally ends on the first Sunday in August, and at midnight the following Monday tickets go on sale for the next year. Remarkably, all 75,000 tickets were sold out within 43 hours for 2014, 12 hours for 2015, and 23 hours for 2016, despite the fact that the lineup (with the exception of rumors or headliners) had not been announced. The non-optional basic ticket price for all four days, including camping for a week, was €220 in 2017 and will be for 2018 as well. In 2015, 158 bands were playing on eight stages.

The international significance of the festival is shown by the attendees in recent years consisting of 30% foreigners, with up to 10% non-Europeans, from about 30-40 different countries all around the world. Many metal fans travel from half a world away just to stand in cow meadows before stages set in the middle of nowhere. In 2017, an official count confirmed visitors from over 80 different nations at the festival. A lot of metalheads, metal and hard rock bands worldwide are keen to make the journey to "The Mecca of Heavy Metal Culture" (Sam Dunn / Metal: A Headbanger's Journey ), "The Holy Land" (Wacken 3D - a 2014 movie shown in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy), "The Cathedral of Heavy Medal" (Paul O'Neill / Trans-Siberian Orchestra), or "The Summit of Heavy Metal" (Thomas Gabriel Fischer / Celtic Frost) at least once in their lifetime, just for the experience.