SXSW 2008 on BitTorrent: 3.5 GB of Free Music
Written by Ernesto on February 22, 2008The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that - thanks to Greg Hewgill - can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.
SXSW has embraced BitTorrent as a distribution method for showcasing artists since 2005, as they release a large collection of MP3s every year, a few weeks before the festival.
This year, for some reason SXSW decided not to release a torrent showcasing the artists (yet). However, all the mp3s are available for download on the SXSW website. Luckily, Greg Hewgill took the time and effort to put all the MP3s in one big torrent, which makes it much easier to download and share. It’s no OiNK, but it is certainly a good way to discover new artists.
Greg writes: “Since 2005, I have supported the annual South by Southwest music festival by operating a “seed” for the BitTorrent files they have created. From 2005 through 2007, SXSW created the torrents themselves and hosted them on their own tracker. I learned that this year, for whatever reason they won’t be doing that for us.”
“So, I took matters into my own hands and have created a torrent of the 2008 showcasing artists.” Greg adds.
The torrent of the 22nd SXSW edition features MP3s from 764 upcoming, as well as established artists who are scheduled to perform at the festival. In total almost 3.5GB of DRM free music. All the torrents previously released by SXSW are also available for download.
For those who are interested, this year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 12-16, in Austin Texas.
Previously: RIAA Expert Witness is “Borderline Incompetent” Says P2P Expert
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Riiiiight…
Looks like we’ll be eating tonight.
Thats a lot of music.
Lots of no name artists-a whole lot of no good music. Why do you think they made it available?
Wicked!
lol i read geri halliwell
[quote comment="295731"]Lots of no name artists-a whole lot of no good music. Why do you think they made it available?[/quote]
Just because it’s not your taste that does not mean the music is no good. In fact, there is no “no good” when it comes to taste, there is a “not main stream” though…
any non-hollywood-money-seeker-artist is a good non-hollywood-money-seeker-artist.
seed with love
Kind of reminds me of this place
http://www.post-consumer.com/
I guess you only listen to what MTV says is good, right?
Idiot.
Damn comment system.
My comment above was directed at SPYCOPY.
Groovy babeh. :D
I hope I can get the awesome Kevin Federline tracks. K-Fed’s such a rebel. SXSW is nothing without him
Tracker owners, private and public should offer their trackers to help seed this in a more efficient manner.
Even if you are the 2nd or 3rd tracker mirror in the list.
nice one!
nice share! the thing i hate about torrents is that it makes mp3s harder to share cause you have to download an entire album usually..
thats why i use toasterfm.com
anything which pisses off the RIAA is worth seeding!
[quote comment="295872"]nice share! the thing i hate about torrents is that it makes mp3s harder to share cause you have to download an entire album usually..
thats why i use toasterfm.com[/quote]
Most bittorrent clients support manual choosing of files you want to download in the torrent.
Here’s a source of the files in .zip format. It was a pretty fast download:
http://www.racingwithgiants.com/SXSW_2008/SXSW_2008.html
i cant download any of the files (sxsw) it keeps telling me there an invalid path with a track so i remove it and it does it again for a different track and again and so on
to bad, that Greg used such a big filesize (2 MB) that impedes the ability to share pieces fast for guys with smaller upload lines :-)
he should also let the torrent track from the pirate bay and with a smaler piece size!
Many will play those songs in fucking players that mess with the tags, which means bad hashed pieces and 2 mb piecesize will result in such an enormous amount of wasted data then!
so Greg if you read this, redo the torrent again please with max 512k or smaller please
I even “allow” you to use the vip trackers if you like ;-)
http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/announce
udp://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/announce
what a picky bunch we are today?
Bahhh Humbugh-
I just downloaded from the zip link above. It’s broken into three files, and took around 10 minutes for all of them. (2007 songs are also up, and are downloading as I type)
Cant say I like any of the music there, but it’s nice of them to make it available to the fans.
I’m downloading from the zip file website as well. First file was super fast (15 mins). Sadly, I waited for an hour to do the second file, and now things are much slower (although way faster than a torrent). I guess a few people may have joined in the downloading fun!
btw, poking around the zip file guys website, I don’t actually see any in bound links to the sxsw stuff. (it’s not at all related to music–it’s an extreme sports team website). I wonder if they put it up for their buddies, and somehow the link got out?
If so, I bet their bandwidth usage is about to get crushed!
bittorrent sucks !
defiantly will be attending SXSW this year
I love torrent freak , it’s my heart!
long life TF, always latest subjects
http://fishingandflyfishingtips.blogspot.com/
Too late, already downloaded them all manually. Fun.
There will be music that is worth listening to. Lots of indie labels showcase there. Hopefully it’s labeled well so I don’t have to download the crap.
Need more seeds for the torrent given the speed!
Zip files aren’t doing much better, although it helps that they are broken into 9 files rather than one large one.
i hope the RIAA kneecaps you all
Anybody know how the tracks are named are they properly tagged?
Here’s a shortlist of some artists. These are not exactly no-name.
The Stooges, Spoon, Kings of Leon, Donovan, The Buzzcocks, Fratellis, Bloc Party, Straylight Run, The Black Angels, The Bravery, Hawthorne Heights, Armor for Sleep, Jack’s Mannequin, Amy Winehouse, Badly Drawn Boy, Against Me!, This Is Me Smiling, Jandek, Kava Kava (band), The Horrors, The Sword, The Briefs, Lily Allen, Bobby Lounge, The Early Years, The Stitches, Austin TV, Circa Survive, Eisley, Gallows, Razorlight, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly., Ozomatli, Die! Die! Die!, Maritime, Russian Circles, Dustin Kensrue, Moros Eros, Albert Hammond, Jr., Bob Mould, Far-Less, Powell St. John, Tally Hall, Tub Ring, The Cinematics, Sparklehorse, Best Fwends, The Wombats, WinterKids and Cold War Kids.
http://2008.sxsw.com/music/showcases/date/2008-03-12.html
check for your self, PP you8 can downlaod every track one by one from the page
(or if you know how to extract the URL for the single files from their subdomain to one handy URL txt list easily, fire up some massdownloader
the urls are like this
http://audio.sxsw.com/2008/mp3/Kim_Fontaine-Coincidentally.mp3
[quote comment="296364"]i hope the RIAA kneecaps you all[/quote]
For what, downloading a legal torrent of officially sanctioned MP3s?
My, but what a cute little dumbfuck you are.
Also, I’d love to see the RIAA kneecap somebody. That is, if they can find any free time between getting kneecapped to a pulp by the filesharing empowered public and watching their extortion racket slowly go down in flames.
I am from THE COMPANY. I will delete all your bad habits from your brain. Now everyone sing “I am the walrus”…coo-coo-ca-choo.
@advocate
see why such big piecesizes are not good
downspeed (avg. 36.4 kB/s)
upspeed (avg. 7.6 kB/s)
wasted 114 MB (43 hashfails)
86MB gone just for bad data :-(
Hey please give my sxsw related website a visit at
SXSWCrazy.com
well done
[quote comment="295731"]Lots of no name artists-a whole lot of no good music. Why do you think they made it available?[/quote]
[quote comment="295731"]Lots of no name artists-a whole lot of no good music. Why do you think they made it available?[/quote]
anybody have the FLAC? or any other uncompressed file?
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on the topic of sxsw, Carlotta will be playing the festival… if you like muse, queen, franz ferdinand, the cold war kids, or some of that sticky icky, you should check them out: http://www.CarlottaTheBand.com .
If they we’re any good there music would be out there by now :/ Heres a free download for all you 30 somethings who wanna be hip SXSW sucks ballz
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