Approximately 400,000 people attended the 1969 Woodstock festival near Bethel, New York.
Woodstock was held from August 15 to 18, 1969, at dairy farmer Max Yasgur’s farm in the town of Bethel. Organizers initially expected a much smaller crowd, but hundreds of thousands of young people traveled to the event.
The audience was so large that the festival effectively became free after crowds overwhelmed the ticketing and fencing arrangements. Contemporary and later estimates commonly place attendance at about 400,000, although the exact total cannot be verified because many people entered without tickets.
The figure is sometimes confused with the estimated 600,000 attendees at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. Woodstock’s attendance also differed from its original commercial planning: it began as a ticketed event but became famous as a free concert for many attendees.