How To Enjoy SXSW Music Even If You’re Not There

If you're not attending SXSW Music this year you may find the media coverage a bit off-putting at times with its assumption that you're on the scene. But there are some nice options for enjoying what's happening even if you're not present in 2013. Multiple free music samplers of bands in attendance are available for download, events are being livestreamed and media outlets are live blogging and videotaping on the daily.

Once again I'm a no show at SXSW but I'm not annoyed in the least by SXSW 2013 coverage except for the pictures of tasty-looking food items. Stop that right now!

To keep up with goings-on, you can certainly follow #sxsw and other hashtags on your favorite social media outlets such as Instagram (via Statigram), Twitter and Vine (via SeeVine), but you may find the flood just a bit much. The following resources will give you a look at what's happening at SXSW Music in a focused yet enjoyable manner.

Free Music Sampler Downloads

SXSW 2013 on BitTorrent: 7.39 GB of Free Music

"For the ninth year in a row SXSW is sharing DRM-free, RIAA-safe songs of performing artists, totaling 7.39GB so far. All the tracks can now be downloaded for free in one go, thanks to BitTorrent."

NPR's The Mix: The Austin 100

"Hear And Download 100 Songs By Artists To Discover At SXSW 2013"

Don’t Mess With Texas: The Daily Rind's SXSW 2013 Music Sampler

"Tracks from 19 can’t-miss-artists, including Emma Louise, Local Natives, Ra Ra Riot, Charles Bradley, The Virgins and more."

Livestreaming Events

SXSW Inc.'s list of official events being streamed by various providers includes 6 full hours of the Music Accelerator on March 13.

IROCKE has a schedule of livestreaming music concerts including multiple 4 and 6 am shows hosted by KGSR Live and multiple 10 am shows at Waterloo Records.

LiveMusicStage.com will be livestreaming "interactive interviews with music industry heavyweights" from NARM's digitalmusic.org SXSW booth on March 11 and 12. This is also the launch of LiveMusicStage.com's Austin Tech Talk channeled sponsored by Hypebot among others.

NPR will be livestreaming select SXSW events including Dave Grohl's Keynote Speech on March 14.

Live Blogs and Daily Video Coverage

Wired's SXSW Liveblog is doing a nice job of combining text and photos as part of their daily coverage.

Billboard.biz's SXSW Social Scoop is drawing a bit more on Vine in their mix. If you're on Firefox, you may need to switch browsers to get the full multimedia effect.

Shindig will be broadcasting daily band meet and greets at 4 pm from March 12 to March 16.

Digital Trends: SXSW Coverage may not cover all of SXSW Music but their coverage of SXSWi has been entertaining and has included a number of music startups so I'm including them in the list.

In addition, they've posted a selection of best apps for "pretending" you're at SXSW which provide additional daily coverage and linkage. Some of these are pretty interesting.

Music and Binge Drinking

For many people, binge drinking is such a big part of SXSW that they celebrate it online like college kids on Spring Break. Because I have some issues with binge drinking, like having watched some of my older musician friends attempting to drink themselves to death on a daily basis, I tend to avoid such celebrations.

That being the case, I've resisted covering Ali Spagnola's Power Hour Album Drinking Game here at Hypebot but, hey, don't let that stop you. You might not be able to make it to SXSW or Spring Break but you can always drink too much wherever you live. Cheers!

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at All World Dance: Videos and maintains Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

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