Each year, the SXSW film and music festival in Austin, Texas hosts a blockbuster bonanza of music performances from roughly lunch time to as late as 3 or 4 a.m. the following morning. And each year, literally hundreds upon hundreds of artists and bands of every imaginable genre, from locales all across the United States and Canada, and cities and town on six continents around the world, descend on Austin during the second week of March for the largest annual gathering of musicians anyway on the planet.
From popular indie bands to DIY alternative rockers, celebrity artists and obscure musicians, from electro pop duos to folk music collectives, masters of punk to veterans of classic rock, and every other type of configuration and style of music you can possibly think of (and those which you never knew existed), SXSW has it all.
They perform in bars, clubs, theaters, music halls, churches, school gyms, hotel lobbies, restaurants, auditoriums, outdoor stages, street corners, vacant lots, rooftops, bicycle shops, pizza joints, alley ways and homes – it doesn’t matter where you go – for four to five days, Austin is home to a non-stop music marathon. Bands are made and broken; artists rise and fall; dreams are launched or crushed each year at SXSW.
The music industry, including CEOs of the biggest record companies and owners of the smallest labels, plus scouts, A&R reps, producers, engineers, managers, publicists, PR executives, among others, from around the world come out in full force; as do gaggles of reporters, writers, photographers, editors, and columnists from the largest to the smallest newspapers, magazines and blogs; not to mention hosts, anchors, correspondents, cameramen, and sound engineers from hundreds of TV and cable news and entertainment outfits, as well as deejays, program directors and staff from radio stations across the globe.
If you’re somehow involved in music, the journey to and through Austin’s city limits each March for the experience of a lifetime.
And then of course there are the music lovers, who flock by the thousands to make the pilgrimage, even if only once in their lives,