Since 2005, the festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.

For some of the previous editions, the festival organizers offered torrents of the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been handed over to the public.

All of the MP3s are still freely available for download on the festival’s site, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.

For the past four years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s on BitTorrent, and this year two torrents containing 1.219 tracks have been released.

7.51 gigabytes of free music in total.

Every year the SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading the gigabytes of free music from both established acts and upcoming bands in virtually every music genre.

In total, the torrents of the previous editions have been downloaded close to 200,000 times.

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 13-18 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their mp3-players without having to invest thousands of dollars.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All of the MP3s are still freely available for download on the festival’s site, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running. For the past three years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and this week the first torrent containing 792 tracks has been released.

The 4.49 gigabyte torrent will likely be followed by another release later this month or early March.

Every year the SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading the gigabytes of free music from both established acts and upcoming bands in virtually every music genre. In total, the torrents of the previous editions have been downloaded close to 150,000 times.

Although all tracks can also be streamed and downloaded directly from the festival website, a big torrent makes more sense since it’s easier than laboriously downloading every MP3 separately. In addition, using BitTorrent saves SXSW some money in bandwidth costs. The good news is that, for once, the RIAA isn’t watching over your shoulder when downloading music

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 16-20 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars.

For those interested in even more free music to fill up their MP3-players, there’s always Jamendo with nearly 50,000 free-to-download albums, also supported by BitTorrent. That’s a few Terabytes of free music, good for 5 years of continuous play.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Since all of the MP3s are available for download on the festival’s site, it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.

In 2008 it was Greg Hewgill who took the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and for the 2009 and 2010 editions Ben Stolt has done the same. Torrents of the previous editions have been a huge success and were downloaded more than 100,000 times.

All the tracks have been made available by the artists themselves which means that they are totally RIAA-safe. The first release of the 2010 SXSW edition contains 646 tracks totaling 3.35 GB. A second batch with another 200+ tracks is expected to be released in the near future (edit: it was released a few hours ago).

The torrents include tracks from upcoming as well as established artists in nearly all music genres one can think of. If you’re in for a musical journey at no expense it is absolutely a recommended download.

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place between March 17-21 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest tens of thousands of dollars.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This is the third year in a row that SXSW uses BitTorrent to share music of the artists that perform at the conference. Last years MP3s were released in two sessions that are both still available. The 2006 release is a collection of almost 1000 MP3s, and both torrents are still alive and kicking.

A torrent with film trailers from the movies featured at the 2007 Film conference will be put up later this month.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.