Tickets For Woodstock '99 Likely Brought In More Than $60 Million
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ICYMI, the new Netflix doc surrounding the chaos of Woodstock ’99, the festival that was supposed to mimic the peacefulness of the original Woodstock festival of 1969, is officially out as of August 3. And the first episode is...a lot.
The three-part docuseries titled Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 dives deep into the disaster that resulted. Attendees didn't have access to clean water, people got trench mouth (yes, the WWI-associated infection), there were tons of crimes, sexual assault reports, and three people even lost their lives.
So, yeah, a lot went wrong—but the festival also made a lot of money. With more than 400,000 attendees coming to the four-day summer music festival and ticket prices costing $150, that’s already a multi-million dollar total. Add in vendors, and it’s a lot more.
Read on to find out everything about how much money Woodstock ’99 made, and how much its co-founder, Michael Lang, was worth.
How much were tickets worth?
Tickets were sold for about $150 plus service charges, per The Washington Post. With more than 400,000 attendees, that is well over $60 million that the festival raked in with ticket sales alone.
How much was Michael Lang worth?
Woodstock festival creator Michael Lang died on January 8, 2021, per the New York Times.
At the time of his death, he was worth about $10 million, per The Sun and Celebrity Net Worth. He first got the idea for Woodstock after planning the Miami Pop Festival in 1968, which Jimi Hendrix headlined. Aside from working on Woodstock '99, he also planned the original festival in 1969, and the first follow up Woodstock festival in 1994, per NPR.
After the first Woodstock, he founded Just Sunshine Records, which produced music by Betty Davis, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Karen Dalton, per Vanity Fair. He also managed artists such as Joe Cocker, Rickie Lee Jones, and Willy DeVille for a bit.
How much money did Woodstock ’99 make?
The whole thing cost $38 million to produce, per The Huffington Post. But the more than $60 million made off of tickets alone would have probably covered those production costs nearly twice over.
According to Syracuse.com, a bottle of water, a cup of coffee, or a bag of potato chips or peanuts (just some of the snacks) cost around $4 each, and the 11 nonprofits on site working at food booths made $73,000.
While final tallies are hard to determine, it's safe to say organizers probably turned a pretty penny when it was all over.
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