SXSW 2009
[Moozik: The Beloved - Hello]
The South By Southwest festival is one of the largest music festivals in the US, with more than 1,400 performers playing in venues in Austin over four days every March. What's particularly cool about the event is that they always release "sampler" MP3s of the bands playing at the festival. It's an amazing way of finding new bands & artists you've never heard of before.
This year they've released a whopping 6.15GB of music. That's 1267 music files. The files themselves are broken up into 3 torrents to download individually. I downloaded them all at the weekend and now begins the major project of listening to them all.
With 1267 songs, there's going to be an awful lot of utter poo to wade through. I'm focusing on the first torrent of files for the next couple of weeks, 519 songs in total. In the first pass I get rid of stuff I absolutely hate. It's quite easy as some songs are immediately recognizable as utter bollocks within the first 20-30 seconds of listening. Then with whatever I have left over after that first pass, I listen to again to see if there's anything really worth keeping.
I really don't know how long this whole listening project is going to take but if I come away with at least a handful of new bands that seem interesting it will be worth it. Or not. I'll know in a few weeks.
I've always wanted to go to SXSW, but have never made it. Timing and all is the wrong time every year.
But at least we have a torrent full of cool songs. And as you said, there's normally a few new bands that grab my interest.
Damn that's a lot to wade through.
CBC Radio 3 has a podcast of their top picks for Canadian acts at SXSW -- might be worth a listen if you want to condense it a bit...
marty... yeah, the more I read about SXSW the more I'd love to go one day as well. So far I'm deleting five songs for every one I'm keeping. That's on the first pass.
nat... yeah it's actually a hell of a lot to wade through. But it's kinda fun actually. Some people I know wade through the SXSW torrents every year. This is my first year doing it. Time will tell if I get sick of it and avoid it like the plague next year ;-)
Good idea but it looks like a forever download!
göran... there are so many seeders that the downloads don't actually take that long. I was quite surprised.
Yes! I got them all 3 now and are browsing through. Quite a lot that seems interesting actually.
Thanks for the tip! :)