streaming

In what has become a sort of tradition around here, I am once again posting a link to the torrents that have all the MP3 files publicly posted on the SXSW Website that will be at the music showcase this year. This year’s torrents include 1,593 files totaling 10.33GB, making it the largest to-date.

SXSW 2016 Showcasing Artists Part 1, 1,006 files, 6.50GB
SXSW 2016 Showcasing Artists Part 2, 587 files, 3.82GB

Links to torrents for earlier years can be found on The (Unofficial) Home of SXSW Torrents website.

If you don’t want to have all these songs on your hard drive but want to have a listen, use this SXSW radio to give a random selection a listen.

So the SXSW Music Torrent is on some shaky ground this year. According to the SXSWTorrent.com (where I have gotten most of my previous links to SXSW Torrents):

Starting this year SXSW is replacing the sample tracks they have provided for years with links to Soundcloud pages. While there are certainly known ways to download those samples, Soundcloud goes through considerable trouble to prevent that from happening. Since these torrents have always been about providing easier access to otherwise readily downloadable samples instead of outright piracy, this regrettably means that, if SXSW sticks with this new design, we will be unable to provide torrents in the future.

So this year, SXSWTorrent.com has a single torrent with 783 tracks and there will likely not be a second installment this year.

There has been an effort to get a playlist together over on Spotify. So far there are 1800 tracks on that list.

Additionally, Pirate Bay has links to a torrent that claims:

Unofficial SXSW 2014 Music Showcase – over 1200 songs from 1200 different bands from the upcoming Annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, TX. More complete than www.sxswtorrent.com – contains rips from youtube, soundcloud, and the SXSW site itself.

There is lot of overlap between all these sources, however, each source also contains songs the others don’t. Hopefully next year we’ll have a single, comprehensive list once again.

UPDATE: The Pirate Bay torrent has a bunch of missing file information so @pronoiac gathered it all up and put it in a spreadsheet. Additionally NPR has put out a list of 100 downloadable songs from bands at this year’s SXSW.

I’m a little late to the party this year but the 2013 SXSW Music Showcase Torrent is up for your downloading pleasure. I try to post a link to the torrent every year but Greg Hewgill’s website has torrents for SXSW years going all the way back to 2005. This year the torrent contains 999 files totaling 6.13 GB of music from bands playing at this years South By Southwest Music & Media Conference. Keep a close eye on Greg’s website because he will most likely be putting up a second torrent with more bands in early March.

If you’re not interested in downloading/seeding but still want to listen to the music you might want to try this (currently not working) SXSW FM page.

As per tradition, Here is a link to the 2011 SXSW Music Showcase Torrent. This year the torrent contains 771 files totaling 4.41 GB of music from bands playing at this years South By Southwest Music & Media Conference. Keep a close eye on Greg Hewgill’s website because he will most likely be putting up a second torrent with more bands in early March.

I have yet to find a service that is streaming this year’s files.

UPDATE: The second torrent has been released. It has an additional 448 files (2.8 GB)

[via jwz]