Category: SXSW

SXSW 2013: Best Bands Spotify Playlists, 10 Free SXSW Samplers and Thousand Song SXSW Torrents

Posted on by Max Hammer

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A couple of days ago, we featured our first SXSW 2013 Spotify playlist comprised of excellent songs from just some of our favorite bands and artists performing at SXSW 2013, including Alt-J, Why?, Shout Out Louds, Major Lazer, PS I Love You, Surfer Blood, Third Eye Blind, Toro Y Moi, Telekinesis, Thurston Moore, Kendrick LamarRhye, Gliss and many others. In addition, the 2013 Top 10 Songs for February and January (determined by which songs listeners download and stream the most), also feature amazing new singles from a variety of SXSW artists and bands .

In addition to the first volume, we produced three other SXSW 2013 playlist mixes via Spotify for a total of 120 outstanding songs by over 100 artists, from some of the most popular indie and alt. bands on the planet, to more obscure, DIY and breakout artists creating a buzz in the past six months or so.

In volume two of IRC’s SXSW 2013 Best Bands Spotify Playlists series (featured to the right), listen to new, and some older, choice tracks from artists like DIIV, Atlas Genius, FIDLAR, Boats, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Braids, Small Black, Deer Tick, The Away Days, Guards, Lord Huron, Everything Everything, Skrillex, Dent May, and Talib Kweli, among others.

But wait, it gets even better. We’ve carefully assembled a list of 10 Free SXSW 2013 Samplers, plus, a compendium of the world’s largest collection of SXSW torrents, consisting of over 9,000 songs dating back to 2005. You’ll also find volume three of our SXSW 2013 Best Bands Spotify Playlists, highlighting another set of 30 selected tracks from some of our favorite SXSW 2013 bands and artists.

  1. The Don’t Mess With Texas SXSW 2013 New Music Sampler is a free download on Amazon of 20 MP3 songs from artists such as Local Natives, The Virgins, The Ocean Blue, Young Galaxy, Ra Ra Riot, Parenthetical Girls, and PAWS.
  2. SPIN spun up a mega zip of 60 tracks highlighting a broad genre and geo diversity of artists at SXSW 2013, including The Coathangers, Beach Fossils, California X, Wavves, Toro Y Moi, The Soft Moon, Generationals, Lightouts, Dent May and dozens of others.
  3. Paste put together a SXSW 2013 free download in conjunction with HGTV, and made available via NoiseTrade, titled The Stages on Sixth (referring to 6th Street, the heart of Austin’s downtown music scene), featuring 25 artists booked for appearances at the Paste/HGTV showcases during SXSW, like Billy Bragg, Social Studies, City and Colour, Easter Island, Ron Sexsmith, Josh Rouse, The Virginmarys and many more.

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  4. Emusic.com has assembled a sweet collection of 35 free tracks in their eMusic SXSW 2013 Sampler, available to be downloaded as one entire album, or by selecting individual tracks. Artists featured include FIDLAR, Nu Sensae, Waxahatchee, Pissed Jeans, The 1975, Flume, Parquet Courts, King Tuff, Royal Baths, and Dana Falconberry, to list just a few.

  5. As they have done every year for more than a decade, NPR has put together an extensive SXSW artist and music guide. This year, NPR put together The Mix: The Austin 100, a collection of 100 songs from 100 artists from SXSW 2013, representing a diverse selection of talented musicians and bands. The 800+ MB zip includes tracks from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Cafe Tacvba, Alt-J, Youth Lagoon, Waxahatchee and Le1f.

  6. The website SXSW Baby! has put an 80 song 314 MB SXSW 2013 sampler broken into 8 songs with 10 tracks apiece, with categories like The British Sound Invasion, This Land Is Your Land, and A Little Bit of Rock With Your Roll. Bands include Conveyor, The Crookes, Roadkill Ghost Choir, LIttle Green Cars, Jack Bugg, Foxygen, Delta Rae, The Little Ones, Desert Noises and Reptar.

  7. Little Brother Music Publishing released the Little Brother SXSW 2013 Sampler of 25 songs you can either listen to online and/or download for free. Artists include Yellow Red Sparks, Babybird, Flogging Molly, The Tricks, Shurman, The White Buffalo, Baron Sisters, among others.

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  1. Polyvinyl Records released a free Amazon SXSW 2013 Sampler of its artists booked for SXSW 2013, such as Generationals, STRFKR, Of Montreal, Japandroids, Deerhoof, Psychic Twin, Painted Palms and five others.
  • Texas-based blog CultureMap‘s Texas Showcase Showdown sampler includes songs from 15 of the Lone Star state’s own official South by Southwest showcase bands, including Wild Child, Dana Falconberry, The Crooks and Band of Heathens, to name a few.

    • Note: By the way, we need to put this out there. No one actually says “S-X-S-W” in a conversation – it’s either South By Southwest, which is actually respectful if you think about it, or ‘Southby,’ which is a hipster phraseology that we’re just not going to say. Simply put, “South By Southwest,” in conversation is the way to go.

    1. The We Can Only Be The Future website’s Future Sounds SXSW 2013 Spotify Sampler is a 20-song playlist with tracks by FIDLAR, Spider Bags, Foxygen, Blue Hawaii, Bleached, Pissed Jeans, The Warlocks and The Afghan Whigs.

      If you’re set up for torrents, and have disk space and time, you can go to town on the website SXSWTorrent.com – The (Unofficial) SXSW Torrents. SXSWBaby houses nine years and more than 9,000 songs, totaling 45 gigs of SXSW samplers, beginning in 2005 right through to this year. In fact, the 2013 torrent (in two parts) includes over 1,200 songs and 7.4 gigs in total size.