READING Festival has been ranked as the sixth most popular festival in Europe.
Shipping and ferry operator DFDS has compiled data of more than three million Google searches from more than 440 music festivals across Europe.
Now they have ranked them based on their popularity, with Belgium’s Tomorrowland taking the top spot.
It was followed in second place by Glastonbury, and Hellfest in France.
Germany’s Parookaville and Rock Am Ring ranked fourth and fifth respectively.
Reading Festival ranked sixth, four places ahead of its sister festival, Leeds, which ranked 10th.
Download Festival placed seventh, Sziget, in Hungary, ranked eighth, and Germany’s Rock Werchter ranked ninth.
Reading Festival has garnered more than three million searches in the last two years, a million more than Leeds.
Reading also took the second place in the overall UK rankings, beaten only by Glastonbury, and Leeds ranked fourth in the UK.
Download Festival was ranked third in the UK, and Boomtown rounded out the top five.
Overall France emerged as the most popular country for music fans, with 33 of its festivals totalling more than 18 million searches across Europe.
A list of 444 European music festivals were compiled across 53 countries, with search terms generated for each event under several variations including ticket searches.
The terms were run through Google Keyword Planner to generate search volumes for each keyword.
The data was aggregated across the countries to compare each country’s most popular home-grown festivals and elsewhere.
This year Reading Festival welcomes Blink-182, Lana Del Ray, Liam Gallagher, Fred Again, Skrrllex, The Prodigy, Two Door Cinema Club, Pendulum, and 21 Savage.
Reading Festival has announced two new stages for this year, the Chevron Stage and the Aux stage.
The Chevron stage will feature an open-air dance experience with “ground-breaking” immersive lighting technology of a scale “never” seen before.
It will hold capacity for 40,000 people, and feature the world’s first floating video canopy, which sees the use of hundreds of thousands of LED lights being used as a display.
It is 90% transparent and will hang above the audience, allowing them to see the sky through it.
The Aux stage will see interactive talks, streams, live podcasts, and activities to this year’s outing.
A live version of the Antics with Ash podcast is coming to the stage, where Ash Holme will bring her outrageous, nothing-off-limits show to the festival.
She’ll be joined by George Clarke of The Useless Hotline podcast, where he is joined by Max Belgade to tackle dilemmas sent in by listeners, with previous guests including Drag Race UK Vs The World winner Tia Kofi and star of Heartstopper and Celebrity Big Brother Bradley Riches.
Reading Festival returns to Richfield Avenue from Thursday-Sunday, August 21-25.
Tickets and full details available via: readingfestival.com
To read the full results of the research, visit: https://www.dfds.com/en-gb/passenger-ferries/destinations/europe-music-festivals
