‘Wacken Worldwide’ Was the Single Biggest Livestream of 2020 in Any Genre

The proliferation of livestream concerts is undoubtedly one of the biggest stories for music in 2020, a small boon to artists looking to make up for lost touring income. Just how lucrative they can be for bands remains to be seen, but artists certainly tried, offering everything ranging from living room acoustic performances to full production live sets and everything in between.

With concert activity for the year largely having concluded, the numbers are now in: Pollstar has calculated and ranked how various livestreams from across the music spectrum performed. And it’s one of our own — not a country, pop or hip-hop artist — who has taken the #1 slot: Wacken Worldwide!

Wacken Open Air, one of the world’s largest metal festivals, hosted the four-day streaming event from July 29 through August 1, with exclusive band performances, interviews, and a whole host of interactive features. Pollstar reports that the festival collected an estimated aggregate of 11 million streams over its running time.

The second most popular stream, by French DJ David Guetta in May, garnered 7,729,344 streams.

It’s worth noting that Guetta is a single artist compared to the dozens that performed or were featured on Wacken’s broadcast — and his event was only one night as opposed to four — but still! Metal wins! Yay!

The rest of the top 100 livestreams chart was dominated by pop, country and classic rock artists. The only other artist even remotely approaching anything “heavy” was a stream by Jon Bon Jovi in August that garnered 630,000 streams.

Congrats to Wacken for this incredible achievement! A fantastic job making lemonade out of lemons, even though the event was free to watch and couldn’t possibly have helped fill in for the revenue lost by the festivals and its performers.

You can have a look at the chart right here and view a few performances from Wacken Worldwide below.