Video: 10,000 Fans Attend ‘Download Pilot’ Festival in U.K.

Download Pilot, the scaled-down version of the U.K.’s annual Download Festival, is taking place this weekend at the festival’s usual site in Donington Park.

Although the full-scale annual Download Festival won’t be happening for the second year in a row as a result of the ongoing pandemic, Download Pilot, which will admit 10,000 fans instead of the fest’s usual 80,000, is part of the U.K. government’s Events Research Programme, which “aims to examine the risk of transmission of COVID-19 from attendance at events and explore ways to enable people to attend a range of events safely.” No single-day tickets to the three-day fest were for sale; instead, only three-day camping passes were made available to 2022 ticket holders. While no social distancing or masking mandates exist inside the festivals, attendees had to receive a negative lateral flow test result to enter the festival and submit to a PCR test before and after the event. The results will be used for the government’s study.

Bullet For My Valentine, Enter Shikari, While She Sleeps, Neck Deep, Sleep Token, Skindred and The Wildhearts are among those performing.

You can watch a BBC news report from the event below.