Spatial and social aspects of the impact of Pol’and’Rock Festival and Jarocin Festival in Poland

Abstract

Among the popular music festivals operating in Poland in the last forty years, two of them played a special role, especially for their young recipients of amplified music. The first of them was the Rock Festival in Jarocin (it had different names) functioning in the years 1980–1994, so still in the period of communist authorities. Reactivated in 2005, it recently operates under the name Jarocin Festival and uses the legend of the event from the 1980s. In the new socio-political conditions, the second important event, the Pol’and’Rock Festival (called Woodstock Station in 1995–2017), began to function in 1995, which in the late 1990s exceeded 100,000 participants and became the largest popular music event in Poland. The aim of the study is to characterise the impact of these two important popular music festivals in Poland at the turn of the second and third decade of the 21st century in the spatial and socio-cultural dimensions on the community of its participants. Referring to the traditional chorological paradigm of human geography, an analysis of the differentiation of the territorial impact of festivals was made, and using patterns immersed in social geography-oriented music research, factors motivating to participate in festivals were determined.