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Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.

I'm Chris Melanthe, chart analyst,

pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?

On today's show, it's August 2019, And if you've been following music news for the last few weeks, you probably know it's the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which took place

not in Woodstock, New York, but in nearby Bethel in August 1969.

You maybe also heard this year that attempts to mount a Woodstock 50 commemorative

concert ultimately failed.

Here at Hit Parade, we've been thinking about the legacy of Woodstock, too.

But of course, we have a particular, quirky, pop-charty prism through which we view music history.

Woodstock was a cultural watershed, to be sure, a miraculous be in, that should never have come off, but somehow not only happened peacefully.

We must be in heaven, man.

But also produced a festival concert for the ages.

This is basically indisputable.

But Woodstock, which, by the way, took more than a decade to turn a profit for its organizers,

was also a major event in the music business.

Most obviously, the live concert business.

Woodstock, though hardly the first of its kind, codified the idea of the

music festival and quite literally set the stage for multi-act concerts in decades to come,

from the Us Festival to Live Aid to Lalapalooza to Coachella.

But what interests us on hit parade is the knock-on effect of this live event on the recorded

music business, and yes, the pop charts.

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