Download Festival 2026— Tickets, Lineup & Dates

Download's prehistory is Monsters of Rock, the open-air hard rock and heavy metal festival staged at Donington Park from 1980 to 1996. Conceived by Maurice Jones and the Midlands Concert Promotions team, Monsters of Rock launched in August 1980 with a lineup headlined by Rainbow and including Judas Priest, Scorpions, April Wine, Saxon, Riot and Touch — a bill that effectively codified the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in front of a sixty-thousand-strong audience. The festival ran annually through to 1996, with headliners that included AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Metallica and Aerosmith. Donington became, in the language of the metal press, the British metal site — the field where you measured your career. The 1988 edition is the part of the story everyone in the scene knows. The bill that year was Iron Maiden, KISS, David Lee Roth, Megadeth, Guns N' Roses and Helloween. During Guns N' Roses' afternoon set, two fans — Landon Siggers and Alan Dick — were killed in a crowd crush near the front of the main stage. The incident led directly to a rebuild of crowd-control practice across British outdoor events, with the introduction of the modern barrier-and-pit system, dedicated medical and welfare provision in front-of-stage areas, and capacity restrictions across festival main stages. Monsters of Rock continued through to 1996 but never operated at the same scale, and the festival ended after that year's edition. Donington sat without an annual festival for six summers. Live Nation, then operating as Clear Channel Entertainment, launched Download at the same site in 2003, with Andy Copping as the festival's booker — a role he has held continuously since. The inaugural Download was a two-day event headlined by Iron Maiden and Audioslave, with Marilyn Manson, Disturbed and Slipknot across the bill. By 2005 it had moved to a three-day weekend, by 2009 it had added a Thursday warm-up programme, and by the mid-twenty-tens it was operating at capacity at one hundred and eleven thousand, with three main outdoor stages and a series of tented stages running across the weekend. The booking philosophy is the through line. Copping has spent two decades building the bill on a consistent principle — rotate the established metal headliners across multi-year cycles, while using the second and third stages to break the next generation of acts. Bring Me the Horizon's progression from third-stage Sheffield upstarts to main-stage headliners is the textbook Download career arc. The festival's relationship with Iron Maiden is the spine of the headliner list. Maiden have closed Download more times than any other act, and the band's Donington history — across Monsters of Rock, the post-Monsters years and Download itself — runs to more than a dozen separate headline appearances. For a British metal fan, a Maiden Donington headline is treated less as a tour stop than as a rite of return.