Wacken Open Air

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 small village of Wacken in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany. With 80,000 festival visitors, and including personnel a total of roughly 86,000 attendees in 2011, it attracts various kinds of metal and hard rock music fans.

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.

The festival ends traditionally on the first Sunday of August, and at midnight the following Monday ticket sales open 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 was €180 in 2016. In 2015, 158 bands were playing on eight stages. The international festival has a unique rate of foreigners by over 30% of the crowd, with up to 10% non-Europeans, from about 30-40 different countries all around the world in last years. Many metal fans travel around half the globe just to stand on cow meadows before stages of Wacken in the middle of nowhere 80 km northwest from Hamburg.

Dozens of bands have recorded their live act at W:O:A on video and sell it on DVD and/or Blu-ray, and of course audio CDs, such as Scorpions, Judas Priest, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister, Saxon, Motörhead, Dream Theater, Deep Purple, Heaven & Hell, Nightwish, Rose Tattoo, Ministry, Savatage, Tygers of Pan Tang, Airbourne, Sabaton, Dimmu Borgir, Immortal, Emperor, Running Wild, Circle II Circle, At the Gates, Sacred Reich, Grave Digger, Rage, Danko Jones, Avantasia, Hypocrisy, Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, Bloodbath, Atheist, Exodus, Megaherz, Gorgoroth, God Seed, Atrocity, Degradead and Arch Enemy. These and international crowds had made the W:O:A famous in global metal community. A lot of metalheads, metal and hard rock bands worldwide are keen make a journey to "The Mekka of Heavy Metal Culture" (Sam Dunn / Metal: A Headbanger's Journey ), "The Holy Land" (Wacken 3D - cinema movie 2014 in GER, CH, AUT and IT), "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.