History of FestiGram: Coachella 2013 Research

By April 2013, I had built the first version of FestiGram, which I called festivaltime at the time. It was similar to today's FestiGram in a lot of respects. The first artist ids are still the ones from Coachella 2013, and a lot of our initial reviews have survived.

At the time, festivaltime had no concept of a set, there was only bands. Also, there was only Coachella 2013-I built another site for Bonnaroo 2013 (in June), and then folded those plus Mountain Oasis 2013 (in October) into one database, and that is the still the database backing FestiGram.

The site itself was written in PHP, and it was a beast, even at only three months old. It was not at all responsive, meaning the layout did not adapt based on screen size. Research (then called pregame) was entirely desktop focused. It was possible to look at it on a phone, but it was basically unusable. Live (then called gametime) was written in dark mode from the beginning, with some simple colors and text indicating who was playing and how many people were there (based on festivaltime checkins).