The story
Roskilde Festival in Roskilde
Roskilde Festival began in 1971 and runs today as a non-profit, charity-funded event on farmland outside Roskilde, drawing around 130,000 people into an eight-day campsite-and-music event roughly 30 kilometres from Copenhagen. Its huge temporary campsite, threaded with large-scale art installations, functions as its own small city well before the main stages open.
Two high school students founded what became Roskilde Festival in 1971, and the non-profit charity model they set in motion still shapes the event today: Roskilde Festival Charity Society channels the festival's surplus into humanitarian and cultural causes rather than private profit, a structure that gives the world's noise-and-crowds spectacle an unusually earnest second identity as one of the largest charitable enterprises in Danish cultural life.