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.
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70 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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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)
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