Wacken Open Air
Crowd communication at a sold-out festival site in Wacken
Every year the northern German village of Wacken turns into the largest metal festival in the world. The 35th edition ran from 29 July to 1 August 2026 and was sold out: 85,000 tickets. Visitors arrive days before the first band and effectively live on site — which means the information that matters is not just the line-up, but the weather, the instructions at the gate and the last train home. That is why the organisers brought in CrowdCows. We deployed our crowd communication at the points where visitors converge: at the entrances, at wristband collection and across the site. The screens ran on our own DVB-T2 broadcast signal and were driven from the control room. Four kinds of message ran on them: the day and night forecast, practical instructions — at collection, for instance, that a wristband is only issued on presentation of ID — public transport departure times, and safety messaging. That last one is not a separate system: a single action from the control room switches the entire picture over. The system stood on site for almost two weeks: build-up from 22 July, breakdown through 4 August, for four festival days. We ran that operation from our German office, CrowdCows GmbH, together with the Dutch team.
What this means under Martyn’s Law
Wacken Open Air is a German event, so the UK’s Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 does not apply to it. The questions the Act asks are the same ones a site of this scale has to answer anyway: can you reach people across the whole premises, can you give different instructions for different procedures, and can you communicate without activating the other procedures at the same time (statutory guidance, paras. 7.46–7.49). Using a third-party product or service is not mandatory to comply with the Act’s requirements (para. 6.7), and the legal responsibility stays with the responsible person, who may delegate tasks but not that responsibility (para. 6.1). A site like Wacken simply shows what those answers look like in practice, at scale. Source: Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025: statutory guidance.
Photos from Wacken Open Air
Case details
- 10× HIKER 200 (192 × 128 cm, 288 × 192 px)
- Own DVB-T2 broadcast signal
- Crowd communication software operated from the control room
- Weather forecasts, instructions, public transport times and safety messaging on the same system
- 4 festival days (29 July – 1 August 2026), Wacken, Germany
- Build-up and breakdown: 22 July – 4 August 2026
- Delivered through CrowdCows GmbH
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