Wonderful free music from SXSW
Last night I fired up Bittorrent and downloaded 3.5 gigs of music from this year’s SXSW bands. Am listening now. It is totally wonderful music. A real gift. To download you need Bittorrent and a few hours (I just downloaded it overnight).
This is a major gift to all of us on the Internet from the bands and from SXSW. I appreciate it very much — this is NOT stolen music, it’s all on the up-and-up. Thank you to Bram Cohen, who brought us Bittorrent. It’s really great to have a way to distribute such large files to everyone in the world.
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February 24th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
It should be noted that this year’s SxSW torrent is an unofficial, community-generated effort, as SxSW. SxSW published and seeded torrents in 2005-2007, but not this year.
A guy named Steve Lacy was able to do some reverse-engineering of their site and generate a list of available MP3 files so enterprising people could download it. I can only presume that the torrent was generated that way. I’ve got some more details and links on my blog.
For those downloading, the song count should be 739 MP3 files.
February 24th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Bob: yeah, but SXSW put up all the songs on their Web site, so this is just another way to get them.
February 24th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
[...] SouthWest in person due to scheduling every year. However, I’ve always snagged the music. Robert Scoble points to a torrent that has all of last years music in it (almost 800 MP3s). The music is available at [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Robert, was wondering which ISP you are on? Not sure if Comcast is still doing it but weren’t they being accused of throttling or ‘delaying’ bandwidth to Bittorrent clients?
February 24th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
For those not wising to use bittorrent to download the music, it is available for listening and download at the SxSW web site also. http://2008.sxsw.com/music/showcases/alpha/0.html
February 24th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I’m on Comcast. I rarely use Bittorrent, and downloads seemed pretty slow last night, but who cares? I just let it run all night long and it was done in the morning.
February 24th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
[...] Robert Scoble pointed out a brilliant source for listening to some great samples of bands performing at this year’s South By South West Festival in Austin, Texas from March 12 - 18 of 2008. Someone has grabbed all the samples from the music pages and loaded them into a torrent file. I had to download Bittorrent to get this, but is is much, much easier than going to each page on the festival site and downloading the songs individually. This is over 700 songs, I have already found three bands I like out of the first fifteen songs I have listened to. Great stuff. Someday I have to make this festival, the artists list is amazing. [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Thanks for the links, Robert, great resource for some new listening.
February 24th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Scoble, seriously dude, you rock! Thanks for sharing this link! :-D
February 25th, 2008 at 12:06 am
[...] [via Scobleizer] [...]
February 25th, 2008 at 1:43 am
What’s really interesting to me is the question of why would a band playing SXSW NOT make their tracks available for people to hear? I can not see a downside, other than the litigation lawyers at a major label saying ‘no no no, we can’t GIVE AWAY an unprotected MP3…’. I’m playing SXSW this year, and I’m proud to have my track up there and am happy in the knowledge that some people may discover my music who wouldn’t have otherwise.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:58 am
oh check out Eli Paperboy Reed and the True Loves if you get a chance - Awesome deep soul
February 26th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
[...] was a heavy lifting day on some rather large databases I needed to share. And I was downloading some “free” music (really - not stealing it!) via [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
[...] brought the availability of the torrent file to my attention from one of his posts. I knew about SXSW going on this month, but I didn’t know that there was a file for download. I [...]
April 7th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
[...] Wonderful free music from SXSWScobleizer — Tech geek blogger [...]
April 8th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
[...] Wonderful free music from SXSWScobleizer — Tech geek blogger [...]