The main purpose of the South By Southwest ("SXSW") Music Festival is to mostly feature independent, previously-unknown bands, not bands who already "made it." Doing so is what places SXSW on the cutting edge of the music industry and makes SXSW unique among festivals. However, that selectivity means that making sense of the vast number of bands at SXSW can be overwhelming, because even if you are a music junkie, you will not have even heard of hundreds if not thousands of bands at SXSW, no less know their body of work. For fans like me who don't let radio and media dictate (or even affect) their preferences, the task is even more daunting.

As many SXSW fans know, SXSW posts music samples (a single song) for many, but not all bands. The samples on the SXSW schedule web page at least give some starting point for making sense of which bands you want to see. I don't understand why some bands do not submit samples for the web site--and, indeed, their very best song--because the festival is all about creating buzz and getting fans to your shows so the music execs are more impressed not only by the buzz but also the energy that a packed house creates. There are dozens of shows I have attended solely because I heard the sample on the website (or in the iTunes package that came with badges several years ago). Otherwise, I would have had no idea that a particular band even existed, no less performed at the festival.

The samples are on the individual band pages at this link. As of my first sweep on the web samples in mid-February, there were only 813 samples (still more than previous years), but SXSW has since added about 450 more for a total of about 1270 samples: over 5 gigs of music; far more than ever before made available by SXSW. Bands are starting to catch on.

Downloading all the samples manually can be rather tedious. SXSW used to compile all the samples together into an "official" Torrent: a file-sharing protocol that allows multiple users to download large files more efficiently. (See below for an explanation.) However, the festival no longer creates an official Torrent, so "unofficial" Torrents have popped up in recent years. Click on the following links for the Unofficial 2009 SXSW Torrent, or for the Unofficial SXSW Torrents from 2005, 2006, 2007 or 2008. To download these Torrents, you need a freeware Torrent program like BitTorrent.

Alternatively, you may use a freeware program that harvests all the MP3 files directly from a particular web page. My favorite (for ease of use and effectiveness) is Webripper 1.31, available at this link or this link or this link. Set the target page as the SXSW schedule page, set the type of file as .mp3 or .mpeg, and set the "search depth" to 5 or 10 pages. The program then automatically goes to to all pages linked in the schedule (including the link to the samples) and downloads all the MP3 files it finds. This program will harvest more than just the SXSW samples, but the official SXSW samples are identified in the album tag as "SXSW 2009 Showcasing Artists."

Torrents evolved as a file-sharing protocol because downloading large files (or groups of files) directly from one server requires an immense amount of bandwidth, creating immense delays when more than a few users tried to download files from the same server. Torrents disperse the uploading burdens by dividing huge files into parts, and then allowing users to download those parts separately from each other instead of from one single source. For instance (and for simplicity), divide a large file into 10 parts. Person A downloads Part 1 from the source, and parts 2-10 from other users. Person B downloads Part 2 from the source, and parts 1 and 3-10 from other users, and so on. Doing so makes it so that, in theory, the source file needs to be downloaded from the original source only a fraction of the time than if the Torrent existed. The more users who keep the Torrents open on their computers as "seeds," the faster the downloads for all the other users can be. Torrents have also been used to spread illegal downloads, but we don't advocate or endorse illegal downloads. ("Because... that would be wrong, Senator.") The SXSW Torrents simply allow users to more efficiently download publicly-available music files. The Torrents (and the web harvesting programs like Webripper 1.31) merely dispense with the tediousness of going to each page individually to manually download the samples.