We analysed the hottest hashtags to uncover your favourite music festivals from around the world.
Peak music festival season is on the horizon, and soon tents will be pitching up in parks, campgrounds and arenas around the world, as excited music fans get ready to see their favourite acts.
The popularity surrounding music festivals is not a new phenomenon; people have been getting down and funky in fields for half a century, with Woodstock first held in Bethel, New York in 1969. Now, though, there are heaps of fantastic festivals dotted around the world, with something kicking off somewhere almost every weekend of the year. Each festival, of course, is slightly different, with its own unique style, different genres of music and signature vibes, but most have a hefty dose of camping, relaxing and partying thrown in.
But with so many festivals, it can be difficult to know where to start. After a fallow year, is Glastonbury the one for you? Are you planning on something smaller, like Lost Village of Standon Calling? Or perhaps you’re an international camper, with sights on Coachella, Sizget or Primavera Sound? This year, to help you out, the Hipcamp clan have put our heads together to work out which music festivals are the world’s favourites, with a little help from Instagram. We took to the photo sharing platform to find out which music festivals are the most popular based on how often they had been hashtagged on the social media site.
Drumroll please. Coming out in the top spot as the most Instagrammed music festival in the world is the USA’s Coachella, with a whopping total of 4,201,240 hashtags. It was over 350,000 hashtags ahead of second-place Tomorrowland, one of the best-known festivals in Europe (set in the aptly named town of Boom in Belgium), while recently-held South by Southwest festival was in third place.
Interestingly, seven of the top 10 biggest festivals in the world can be found in the USA. The winner – it’s full name is ‘The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’ – is an annual festival held in California, in the middle of the Colorado Desert. It’s a big hit with celebrities, which in turn generates some extra instagram interest, and it’s famed for its bohemian, laid back, hipster vibe.
Along with Tomorrowland, an electric dance festival held over two weekends with an impressive 3,844,374 hashtags, other notable festivals in the top 10 included Rock in Rio in Brazil, one of the largest music festivals in the world with 1.5 million people attending and an impressive 990,110 Instagram posts. This Brazilian behemoth is a big hitter—at the very first Rock in Rio, headliners included Queen, Rod Stewart, and AC/DC.
Following Coachella, the top 10 most Instagrammed music festivals in the world are:
2. Tomorrowland, Belgium
3. SXSW: South by Southwest, USA
4. UMF: Ultra Music Festival, USA
5. Burning Man, USA
6. Lollapalooza, USA
7. Rock in Rio, Brazil
8. Glastonbury, UK
9. DC: Electric Daisy Carnival, USA
10. Bonnaroo, USA
The United States of America is an immense country, with so many different cultures, traditions, and attitudes that blend together to create a diverse society —and this diversity is clear to see in the music that comes from the country. It’s also one of the biggest producers of music, so it’s no surprise that some of the biggest festivals in the world originated here. Burning Man, for instance, is vastly different from Lollapalooza; while the first is described as an experiment in community and art, and artistic self-expression, the second is a festival dedicated to punk rock, hip hop, heavy metal, and electronic music.
The top 50 is jam-packed with famous festivals all over the world: Sziget in Hungary, Summer Sonic in Japan, Benicassim in Spain, and even Ultra Korea in South Korea.
Festivals that, perhaps surprisingly, didn’t make it into the top 50 include Snowbombing in Austria, Latitude in the UK, and even Dimensions Festival in Croatia, which only managed to rack up 15,163 hashtags. Coming in dead last, of over 160 festivals, was Lucca Music Festival in Italy, gaining only 38 hashtags.
You can view the entire table of results here…
Of course, the UK alone is home to countless music festivals, which have perhaps been squeezed out of the top spots thanks to the more diminutive size of our boutique festivals. But with thousands of campsites dotted around Britain, it’s pretty clear that us Brit’s love the outdoor lifestyle and frankly don’t mind getting muddy in search of a great festival experience. That’s why we’ve also checked out the top UK festivals according to Instagram.
Unsurprisingly, Glastonbury has sealed the number one spot for the UK, with an impressive 731,742 hashtags. This five-day festival needs little introduction, incorporating the latest music, dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and more across over 100 stages – the tickets for the 2019 festival sold out in just 36 minutes. If you were one of the luck campers who refreshed their screen to breaking point and bagged themselves some festival passes, you’ll no doubt be looking forward to the likes of Stormzy, Kylie, Miley, Kamasi and many other top acts (that don’t necessarily rhyme). Other notable UK festivals include Creamfields, Reading and Leeds fest, Parklife, Wireless, and Fforest Gather in Wales.
Following Glastonbury, the top 10 most Instagrammed music festivals in the UK are:
2. Creamfields
3. Reading
4. Bestival
5. British Summer Time
6. Download
7. Boomtown
8. Leeds Festival
9. Boardmasters
10. Wireless
Surprisingly, Reading Festival scored a lot higher than Leeds fest, with 251,209 and 124,589 hashtags respectively.
In order to compile our list of the top 50 music festivals in the world, we curated a list of 162 of the biggest and best festivals, taken from countless articles, and sources listing the must-visit music festivals around the world.
We then crawled Instagram to identify how many posts on Instagram had been hashtagged with the name of each festival and ranked the festivals based on this number to identify our top 50.
For the UK list, we simply took all of the festivals in the UK that made it onto the initial list of 162 and ranked those again by number of hashtags.
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