How Festival Technology Has Evolved Since Woodstock

We’ve come a long way since Woodstock’s four scaffolding towers that were 40 feet high and secured by planks embedded in the ground. While Woodstock’s lighting system was largely a result of doing the best with the site and the constraints in terms of power and stage, modern festival lighting has now reached a point where millions of dollars gets spent on just the main stage lighting alone.

Now, performers bring their own decks of lighting programming to run the thousands of strobe, moving, and LED lights, as well as the thousands of video tiles meant to augment the immersive experience of the show. Lighting engineers need big teams and months of planning to handle the setup and execution.

While scaffolding and decking still have their place in modern music festival stage design, they serve only as pieces of a foundational puzzle and not the end-all, be-all of stage design. Leave that to technology and the growing use of both lighting and video to create a new environment for each artist, song, and mood.

A typical stage backdrop is now slathered in digital experience. Often the stage itself contains video features. Expect to see a mixture of lasers, projectors, digital art, and an ever-changing design planned for every moment of every performance.

When the late Tupac Shakur appeared in concert on the stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella in 2012, it signified a new way to embrace then-emerging technologies in music festivals. Using a hologram-like technology that displayed the rapper via a projector showing a computer-generated image onto a reflective surface on the floor, then shown on a Mylar screen, Shakur’s appearance still rings as a singular moment in festival tech history.

The on-stage tech doesn’t stop there, though, with the use of 3D projections to set the performer within an augmented world as the latest iteration.

From festival goers with wristbands that light up in unison to using that same wristband to serve as the ticket into the festival, smart wristband technology brings visitors a fresh way to stay connected to experiences.

Smartphone technology has, of course, infiltrated the festival experience, too. From apps that map the site and show the schedule to those that act as a payment option, mobile technology personalizes the festival experience.

Woodstock ‘69 had 16 loudspeakers on 27-foot-tall towers. Now, expect to see towers of speakers up to 230 feet high running delay sound programming. The digital delays are timed to align with the sound arriving from the main system. And this accounts for just the main array of sound. Sound engineers map the entire site to provide ample coverage for not only the main stage, but also to limit noise spilling from one section of the festival to another, so as to not drown out smaller stages.

While most visitors to the original Woodstock never heard an actual note of music from the main stage—the sound system wasn’t designed for the crush of crowds or to drown out the weather—modern attendees don’t have to resort to campground hijinks and skinny dipping for experiences beyond the music.

Virtual and augmented reality booths now fill the festival grounds, along with dance floors embedded with LED strips, sensory experiences, smart earbuds that give users the opportunity to adjust the volume, bass, reverb, and flange of the live shows, photo booths aplenty, and tons of product customization opportunities.

The virtual festival experience uses the power of high-definition 360-degree photos, drone footage, and custom video rigs that fly through crowds and embed on stages to capture content from the festival and stream them live to the paying public not on site.

And the content doesn’t stop on the main stage, with footage allowing fans at home to take in the music from the perspective of the artists and explore other experiences from the comfort of their couch.