ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the three Woodstock events in the context of the evolution of live music and its business over the period linking 1969 to 1999 and beyond. It examines three aspects of this evolution: the evolution of music festivals and their status as carnivalized spaces; the development of the live music business, especially the move from entrepreneurship to corporatization; and the 'deterritorialization' of the live event through sound recordings, films and television. If the idealism of Woodstock has been reinvented in the remarkable growth in the number and popularity of outdoor festivals, it is undeniable that the profit motive has inspired and informed much of the subsequent evolution of the rock concert business. Many accounts of rock music have emphasized the contrast between the 'live' event and the recorded artefact. In the live music scene of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the equivalent 'conflicting pressures' are those of corporatization and the carnivalesque.
