The success of Live Aid led to a new interest in rock festivals. These new festivals, however, would have a different structure. The 1986 Amnesty International Conspiracy Of Hope Tour, besides having the longest name of any concert series, was a festival-type tour of America with several bands headlining. U2, Peter Gabriel, and Sting led the two week tour to its final stop, Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on 16 June 1986. Eleven months after Live Aid, the socially conscious concert was the biggest event of the year. Like Live Aid, it was an all day concert with lots of bands joining the core touring group to raise interest in issues like apartheid, torture, false imprisonment, and human rights. The goal of the concert, as with the rest of the tour, was to make everyone more aware of the unethical practices of foreign governments and increase membership of Amnesty International. The concert was broadcasted live by MTV in a strong effort to reach an audience that might otherwise not know about the activities of Amnesty International.

The highly political nature of this event was repeated in the fall of 1988 with the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour. This tour was a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed by every government world-wide, even those that violate it today. This six week tour brought together the old Amnesty supporters like Sting and Peter Gabriel together with new Amnesty supporters like Tracy Chapman, Youssou N'dour, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. They traveled around the world, starting in London and finishing in Buenos Aires, performing in first and third world countries. As well as playing cities like Philadelphia, Tokyo, and Paris, they played in Harare, Abidjan, and New Delhi. The last night of the tour was videotaped and broadcasted in a documentary plus concert form on the cable network Home Box Office two months later. Like the 1986 tour, this tour generated a lot of interest and revenue for Amnesty International. Musically for both tours, the performances were abbreviated versions of the groups' most recent tour, and were not nearly as significant as the tour itself. This touring festival idea spread to the ugly world of heavy metal music, with 1988's Monsters Of Rock tour. This tour, as well as a small and less significant 1989 tour, was just a profit seeking event with no political or social overtones whatsoever. The 1988 tour was a financial and critical failure.

The influence of Monterey can been seen almost twenty years later as Live Aid and the Amnesty tours celebrate the first festival. The charitable nature of the events make them important not only as helping worthy causes but also as a celebration of the music that is promoting these causes. Despite the fact that the money collected from Monterey was not used effectively, it showed that pop music could be used to generate donation. Although this notion was not completely examined until almost twenty years later, the point is that eventually the purpose of the rock music festival was for the greater good of all mankind. The festivals that were without a charitable impetus are just as influential today. If it were not for Woodstock, Altamont, and Watkins Glen, the large festivals like Live Aid would not be possible. All of the festivals have been experiments of music, crowd control, and other ideas. The formula for success, musically and financially as well as politically, has not yet been determined; this is why each new festival is nothing like the previous one. It would have been difficult to imagine an event like Live Aid without all of the festivals before it: the US Festivals for its media interaction, the ARMS benefits for its charitable nature, the MUSE concerts for its politics, Watkins Glen for its magnitude, Altamont for its mistakes, Woodstock for its sense of community, and Monterey for its success.

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