Austin City Limits Music Festival: Now and Then

The highly decorated Texas event known as Austin City Limits Music Festival, which spans for two weekends in October, returns for its 22nd year in Austin.

As locals and music fans from around the country gather in Austin for this incredible multi-genre event, we take a look back at how ACL has transformed from a local public access show to one of the most important musical institutions in the state, all while helping exhibit and mirror the changes in the local musical landscape.

Austin, capital of Texas and “live music capital of the world” has long been a major influence in the sound of American music featuring a city full of incredible talent, a spectacular amount of music venues, and supporting fans. Having helped kickstart the careers of musical icons such as Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vahn, Willie Nelson, and Gary Clark Jr., just to name a few, Austin cemented itself as a major destination for live music and a launching pad for up-and-coming musicians. One major factor in helping Austin’s music scene breakout nationally was the public access television program, Austin City Limits.

ACL operates much like the Ed Sullivan Show or American BandStand, which features live performances from both rising talent and legendary artists, and has helped make Austin a musical landmark since its inception in the mid 1970s. Originally, the program’s primary focus was on showcasing country and folk music, as that was the most popular music coming out of Texas at the time. As the years went on and the popularity of different genres expanded across Texas, ACL progressively began showcasing more artists from varying musical genres including rock, indie, jazz, blues, and hip-hop.

Now, almost fifty years since the show originally aired, the ventures of ACL have expanded through other avenues to expose listeners to new artists including the ACL Live At The Moody Theater venue in downtown Austin and most notably the Austin City Limits Music Festival, featuring two full weekends of live music across an array of genres from local artists to big name acts.

Since the start ACL has been there to capture the musical landscape of the city and was instrumental in exposing to the nation what an amazing music scene Austin has. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Austin was the epicenter for country music having artists from around the nation come in and make their mark. ACL was pivotal in helping spread the word of Austin’s growing country music scene featuring performances from some of the biggest names in country, and simultaneously launching at the same time country music was having a boom in popularity around the US. It was the perfect combo to help stamp Austin’s name on the map and give the city its title as the “Live music capital of the world”.

Overtime, the city of Austin grew and changed immensely. What was once known as the epicenter for country music, has diversified and expanded both in musical taste and culture, creating a whole new atmosphere for musicians and fans alike, and ACL has reflected that perfectly both on their TV program, which still runs to this day, as well as their festival.

ACL Festival launched at Zilker Park in 2002 featuring 67 bands over the course of 2 days. During its first couple years, the types of artist performing at the festival mostly came from similar genres with acts like G. Love & Special Sauce, The String Cheese Incident, and Wilco performing the first year, and was geared more towards a bohemian and hippy type crowd, which were also some characteristics of the city at the time. The festival remained more rock, blues, indie and folk focused throughout the early 2000s, which again was a commentary on the popular music of that period, but was expanding year by year featuring more artists, larger audiences, and more diverse musical genres than the years prior.

By 2013, ACL had expanded to two 3 day weekend events and featured arguably one of the most musically diverse lineups up to that point with artist such as Kings of Leon, Kendrick Lamar, and Kascade, exposing fans to different types of musicians and musical influence, as well as helping expose out-of-town concert goers to the city of Austin. Now in the year 2024, Austin is as big as it’s ever been with over two million people residing in the metro area. For better or worse, ATX has changed dramatically from the small country hippy town it once was, to a booming tech-centric metropolitan, and with that came the cultural and musical shift. With so much of the population consisting of people from out of the state, the musical taste of the city has expanded to include different genres of music from around the country, world even, as has the ACL Festival.

If you were to compare the first ACL event to now, you would think you’d be looking at two completely different music festivals. With the 2024 lineup featuring headlining acts such as Blink 182, Chappel Roan, Chris Stappleton, and Tyler the Creator, there is a much broader range of genres to choose from and a better chance for a fan to discover a new artist that they’ve never heard of before. While yes, it’s true this lineup is not representative of the “Old Austin” look and sound, which is what attracted so many musicians and artists to the city originally, it is objectively more representative of what Austin has become and how the city has diversified.

Although many of the artists on this year’s lineup are more geared towards listeners from across the nation than they are towards Austin locals, the lineup still includes local bands such as Rickshaw Billies Burger Patrol, DAIISTAR, and Asleep at the Wheel, which gives those artists a broader range of listeners, and continues ACL’s tradition of giving exposure to the Austin music scene and helping artists breakout to bigger audiences. So whether you’re from out of town looking to see a headlining artist, or you’re an Austin local who’s looking to expand your horizons, Austin City Limits has you covered.

Austin City Limits 2024 will be happening on 10/4-10/6 and 10/11-10/13. Check out the full lineup and get your ACL tickets here.