From Free Press Houston to Live Index

Live Index publishes research about the economics of live music, and the people who run it spent the previous fifteen years inside the thing being measured. That is worth stating plainly at the top of a chronology, because it cuts both ways. Operating experience is why certain questions on this site are asked at all — what a festival day actually costs to sell, where a fee lands, why a three-thousand-capacity room is the hardest one to fill. It is also the reason every historical claim on this site is sourced to somebody else's reporting rather than to memory. This document is the record of what that reporting establishes.

The chronology below is assembled from contemporaneous Houston coverage and the two project archives published on this site. Each archive carries its own source ledger, edition by edition, and those ledgers are the authority for anything specific: dates, venues, lineups, attendance figures, economic-impact estimates. What follows is the shape of the sequence, not a substitute for the record.

The publishing period

Free Press Houston was an alternative monthly. It is the institution the rest of this history grows out of, and it is the one part of the sequence with the least surviving independent documentation, because alternative papers are rarely written about by anyone other than themselves. The Houston Chronicle's 2013 report on Free Press Summer Fest describes the festival as an outgrowth of that paper and locates its sensibility there; the Houston Business Journal's 2014 profile describes the same people as having started what it calls Houston's largest live music festival. Both are secondary accounts written years after the paper began, and this site treats them as evidence about the festival's origin rather than as a history of the publication itself.

Free Press Summer Fest, 2009 to the sale

The festival began in 2009 as a two-day event in Eleanor Tinsley Park along Buffalo Bayou. Its first-edition admission price — seven dollars for a day — is the single most useful number in this chronology, because it is a documented, dated observation of what mass-market outdoor live music cost in an American city at the start of the period this publication studies. The archive records it against the announcement that carried it, and Live Index's affordability work uses that kind of anchored observation rather than remembered prices.

Growth over the following six years is documented year by year in the archive: venue, dates, lineup, and where reporting supports it, attendance. The founding era ends at a specific date. The majority interest was sold to C3 Media effective December 18, 2015, and the Houston Business Journal reported the resulting ownership arrangement in June 2016. Editions from 2016 onward were produced under that ownership and are recorded here as such. This site does not attribute them to the founding group, and any external account that does is describing something the record does not support.

Day for Night, 2015 to 2017

Day for Night launched in December 2015 as a winter music and digital-art festival, initially in a former downtown post office complex. The Houston Press covered the launch as an attempt to change the shape of a winter festival; the Houston Chronicle profiled it in December 2017; Consequence named the 2017 edition its festival of the year. Those three accounts, written across two years by outlets with no relationship to each other, are the reason this site treats the festival's programming as a documented object rather than a claim.

The programming study published here reads the 2015 through 2017 rosters as data: how many acts, in what proportion between music and visual art, at what scale. That is a narrower question than whether the festival was good, and it is the only version of the question a lineup record can answer. The 2017 identity and motion system, designed by an outside studio and documented in design press, is held in the archive as a separate object with its own credit, because design authorship belongs to the designers.

Where accounts disagree

Two disagreements are load-bearing and are not smoothed over anywhere on this site. The first is role language. Published accounts variously describe the same person as founder, co-founder, publisher and producer of the same projects, and those words are not interchangeable — a co-founder with named partners is a different claim from a founder. This site records the role each source states, attributes it to that source, and does not adopt the strongest available version. The second is the ownership boundary described above: some later coverage refers to the festival's continuation without noting the change of control, which makes the two eras read as one. They were not.

The final segment of the chronology is the present one. Live Index launched in 2026 as a research and data publication, and its launch was distributed as a press release carried by financial-news hosts. This site classifies that item as a syndicated release wherever it appears, and separates it from interviews and from independent editorial. The distinction is the same one applied to every other source in this document: what a publisher printed is evidence, and who caused them to print it is part of the evidence.