The SXSW (South by South-West) Music and Media Conference celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, as it showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over fifty stages in downtown Austin. This year's marks the 20th Anniversary of the SXSW Music And Media Conference and Festival, which will take place March 15 - 19, 2006.
To quote the Guardian, March 25 2005:
"[SXSW] has grown from being a jolly spring get-together for a few hundred US indie labels and musicians in search of a deal, to an international gathering that is the most important date in our music industry calendar."
Over 1200 acts played last year before more than 8000 registrants from all over the world. Pop, jazz, country, blues, reggae, hip hop, electronica - every imaginable style of music, from nearly every continent - is represented each night at over 50 of Austin's premier stages, many within walking distance of one another.
SXSW 2005 released a bittorrent of MP3s showcasing each of the performing acts. I downloaded it in April 2005 and still haven't listened to all of the hundreds of songs that were contained in the (massive) zipped file. Among the ones I have listened to brought bands like Aberfeldy, Ambulance Ltd, The Crimea, The Earlies, Maximo Park and VHS or Beta to my attention.
If you want to supplement your digital music collection with 941 contemporary (and legal) files (and you have three and a half gigabytes of free disk space!), click here, for information of how you can access them.
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If you prefer, you can access these cuts on a band-by-band basis and download by more conventional means by going to
2006.sxsw.com/music/showcases/alpha/0.html
Only acts with the little icon in the left-hand column have downloadable samples.
You may especially wish to go this route if you've downloaded cuts from SXSW last year, as for at least some acts, they're just making the same tunes as last year available again.
These listings may also be useful to you if you want to get a little bit of information about the artists or sort the massive bittorrent downloads by genre without listening to each one or something.
Note that last year's downloads are still available by navigating carefully from:
2005.sxsw.com
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