SXSW Festval Music Review the A's

So as I mentioned in the last post the SXSW Festival is offering 758 mp3s as a bittorent download. It took 2 1/2 days to download on my connection (Comcast cable Internet). There were usually about 30 people downloading it at a time.

Anyways 758 songs is well a lot. At 10 songs per this would be 75 CDs. I own maybe 50 CDs (and I started buying them in the late 80s). They're in alphabetical order which is of limited usefullness because you don't know the style of each song. I decided to sample the songs and see which ones were worth keeping. I laso thought I post my review here.

First of all, a note on my musical biases. I like a good melody. My favorite genres are blues and jazz as well as jazz or blues-influenced pop. I'm not much for metal, country or rap although there is always an exception.

My methodology was to listen to or sample each song for at least 20 seconds or so and keep the ones I thought I could stand hearing again. The rest were tossed. THis is the first cut.

By the way it seems everyone wants to sound like Sarah Mclaughlin or the Spin Doctors these days.

Anyways, here are the ones that made the first cut.

Pop-Folk-Rock
Name	Artist
2/3	Album
Primitive	Ambulance Ltd
The Shore and Stars	Austin Hartley-Leonard
Arms of a Woman	Amos Lee
Coney Island, USA	Amy Correia
105 Feet High	Amy Smith
So it Goes	Anders Parker
Riding To New Orleans	Andi Hoffmann & B-Goes
I Want You Back	Anne McCue
I Was On The Moon	Apollo Sunshine
Folkloric Feel	Apostle Of Hustle
Saved Your Life	Army Of Me
Walk on the Moon	Asobi Seksu
Jazz-Pop Jazz
Name	Artist
Transformation	Alex Skolnick trio
105 Feet High	Amy Smith

Favorite so are: 105 Feet Hight - Amy Smith

So it will probably take me month to do the all 758 but here are the A's.

SXSW Festival uses Bittorent to promote bands

Url: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66819,00.html

Perhaps a glimpse of the future by looking at the present. South By Southwest has decided to promote the bands at the festival by compiling over 750 sonds in one 2.6 gb.

I believe this is another step towards a music ecosystem where more musicians make some money instead of a few musicians making a lot of money. Most of the musicians in the SXSW festival agreed to contribute a song (758 of 1350 bands offered a mp3). It's a lot easier to promote your band this way than trying to get a contract with a label and played on a Clear Channel station (IMHO).

I could be wrong. It wouldn't be ther first time.