A 1960s A-frame church became South Austin's best seat for a song. The 04 Center at 2701 South Lamar Boulevard - the name comes from the 78704 zip code Austinites wear like a badge - is a fully seated 370-capacity listening room carved out of the former Faith United Methodist Church, built in 1969. Austin New Church took the building over in January 2018, and the concert operation run alongside it earned a Best New Venue nomination from the Austin Chronicle in 2019. The A-frame bones do the aco.....

The disco ball over Fruth Street spins for a second act. The 29th Street Ballroom at 2906 Fruth Street, in Austin's campus district, is the storied room once known as the United States Art Authority and later Spider House Ballroom - now revived under its old name by a supergroup of Austin hospitality operators: the teams behind Hotel Vegas, Chess Club, Resound Presents, Yellow Jacket Social Club, Little Darlin' and the neighbouring bar Tweedy's, which occupies the former Spider House Cafe next d.....

Music's Best Address keeps a small room under the big one. 3TEN ACL Live sits at 310 West Willie Nelson Boulevard in downtown Austin, directly below the ACL Live at The Moody Theater - the 2,700-capacity home of the Austin City Limits television taping - and serves as the brand's 350-capacity showcase room: emerging artists, local heroes and world-renowned names playing closer than the mothership ever allows. The room is built to flex. Most music shows run standing-room or general admission wit.....

Austin's Home of the Blues chose its founder as much as he chose it. Clifford Antone - a Port Arthur kid running a sandwich shop with guitars accumulating in the back - opened Antone's on 15 July 1975 in an old furniture store at Sixth and Brazos, booking zydeco king Clifton Chenier on night one. Within weeks Sunnyland Slim and Big Walter Horton had spread the word through the old Chicago guard: a young Texan appreciated their work and paid fairly. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Albert Kin.....

Television's longest-running music series built itself a house that Willie built. Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater, at 310 West Willie Nelson Boulevard in downtown Austin's Second Street District, opened on 10 February 2011 as the purpose-built home of the PBS institution that began in 1974 with a Willie Nelson taping in a cramped university studio. Nelson played the inaugural shows, the street was renamed for him just before opening, and his eight-foot bronze statue has watched the .....

Two promoters threw it together in three months; now it owns October in Austin. The Austin City Limits Music Festival debuted at Zilker Park on 28-29 September 2002, when C3 Presents founders Charlie Jones and Charles Attal - licensing the name of the PBS television institution - booked 67 bands across five stages and sold one-day passes for 25 dollars. They planned for 25,000 people; 42,000 came the first day, and a city tradition was born on the spot. The festival grew as fast as its host cit.....

Austin's biggest theatre stands where the Longhorns once played baseball. Bass Concert Hall at 2350 Robert Dedman Drive opened in 1981 on the site of the old Clark Field diamond, the flagship of the University of Texas Performing Arts Center and still the largest theatre in the city at 2,900 seats. Named for philanthropists Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass, the hall was built to full roadhouse specification: a vast stage, an adjustable orchestra pit holding 100 musicians, dressing rooms for casts of .....

A three-storey organ lives on the third floor of the UT music building. Bates Recital Hall, at 2406 Robert Dedman Drive on the University of Texas at Austin campus, is the principal performance room of the Butler School of Music - a roughly 700-seat hall (652 in standard configuration) that hosts everything from full symphony orchestras, concert bands and major choral programs to jazz big bands, chamber ensembles and solo recitals, most of them free or nearly so. The room's crown is the Visser-.....

Austin's beloved upstairs room got locked out of Sixth Street and reinvented itself in an 1800s granary. The Parish opened in 2003 on the second floor of 214 East 6th Street, and across two decades became one of the city's most respected mid-size stages - a room with famously good sound in the heart of the historic entertainment district, passing from founder-era ownership through ATX Brands' Doug Guller (who once listed it on eBay) to Heard Entertainment, the independent promoter behind Empire .....

A World War II machine shop kept its lathe and got a brewery. Central Machine Works at 4824 East Cesar Chavez Street in East Austin occupies the Quonset-hut complex of Capital Machine Works, a custom metal fabrication shop that opened in 1940 producing aircraft parts and transport trailers - men and women both on the wartime floor - and spent the following seven decades machining custom industrial components for Texas businesses until the shop finally closed in 2016. Rather than let the 9,821-s.....