The FPSF 2015 lineup card, and what a single sheet fixes

A lineup card is a dated, publisher-issued document that states four things at once: when the event runs, where it runs, who was booked, and in what order the organiser was willing to rank them. Very little else in a festival's paper trail does all four. Attendance figures are estimates produced after the fact by parties with an interest in them; economic-impact studies are commissioned and modelled; press coverage paraphrases. The card is the organiser's own claim, fixed on a date, and it can be checked against everything published afterwards.

This one fixes 6–7 June 2015 in Houston, and a bill led by Skrillex, R. Kelly, Weezer, Steve Angello and Major Lazer, with St. Vincent, The Decemberists, Flume, Belle and Sebastian, Mastodon, Chance the Rapper, Tears for Fears and Band of Horses on the tiers below. The Live Index archive of the festival records those names as the 2015 lineup; this is the artefact that reading rests on, rather than a later retrospective list.

The edition it documents turned out to be the last one the founding group controlled. The majority interest passed to C3 Media effective December 2015, and editions from 2016 onward are recorded in the Live Index archive as operated under that ownership. Announcement artwork rarely marks a transition at the time, which is exactly why the dated ones are worth keeping: the boundary is only visible from the far side of it.

There is also a pricing lesson embedded in the sequence this object belongs to. The same archive records advance admission at $7 a day for the inaugural 2009 edition, a two-day pass criticised at around $140 in 2014, and $148 general admission with a $250 VIP tier advertised for 2017. A lineup card does not carry a price, but it carries the scale that the price was attached to — the number of stages, the number of acts, the length of the bill — and comparing prices across editions without holding that scale in view produces a misleading series. Live Index reports those figures as separate sourced observations rather than as a price index, for that reason.

As with every object in this franchise, the credit line stays narrow. The card is credited to the festival that issued it. Live Index does not attribute its design to any individual, because no source in the record names one.