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A big indication of this can be found in the conference attendance itself. The divide between the interactive and the music crowds is diminishing with every new edition of SXSW. This year I met a lot of Platinum badge people (those who paid to attend Film, Interactive and Music), and the first concerts already took place during Interactive! Marketing yourself SXSW is the ideal place to market your music, your band, your brand and yourself! If you go back home after SXSW complaining that you didn’t make any connections or you didn’t get a record deal, it’s only your fault! Wake up! There are no more record deals. In place of those there are opportunities to create a loyal group of followers (fans and superfans!) and connect with them on a personal level. SXSW is one of the greatest places to establish and nurture these connections! If you go to SXSW with the right attitude (again check out Derek’s aforementioned video link) and if you make the most out of it in terms of promotion, you will make connections and you will find a way to make it worth your while. Despite the cost, think of those 13,000 attendants. If you read the list of registrants (which every registrant is provided with) you’ll notice it is a who’s who of who counts! Everyone is there, from record labels to managers, from booking agents to content providers, from media companies to advertising agencies, from press to bloggers, from startups to multinational corporations! Couple of examples? Apple sent 38 employees. Google sent 13. These are people you run into in the streets, people who might give you their business card and will take your CD. This is huge. Catch my drift? Hope South By is and remains a good indicator for the state of things. It’s almost like a thermometer for the music industry. On the one hand everyone is complaining that it’s hard to turn a nickel in profits. On the other hand, I went to grab breakfast at 9:30 AM on the rainy SX Saturday and there were at least five or six dozen young kids who had been waiting in line, in the rain, for a show by a few bands I had never heard of which was to start an hour later! Obviously there is interest, and where there is interest there is potential and hope! Yes we can! Marc Urselli (urselli@recordingmag.com) is a Grammy-winning recording engineer and producer working in New York. Learn more about his projects at www.marcurselli.com. Photos by Marc Urselli and Ryan Chahanovich.

Smokey Robinson gave the SXSW keynote interview (which was inspiring and as true as they come) and Lemmy and GWAR also allowed themselves to be be interviewed (you can imagine the many curse words). Music before words With over 1,980 bands performing in 4 days (and that’s only counting the official selections), picking what you want to see is usually one of the most stressful parts of the entire experience. In previous years I would spend hours going through the schedule, listening to bands online and drafting a plan for running from one venue to the next, only to then find out that once you get there, your schedule goes out the window and is replaced by a mixture of what you had planned, what you actually can manage to do, and what everyone else talks about and recommends you should see. Because of that I decided to make myself the guinea pig of a social experiment: I would not schedule anything myself and instead would crowdsource my agenda with people’s recommendations. The South By website scheduling tool my.sxsw.com was greatly improved over last year’s, however I remained true to my first love sched.org, which is an unofficial but amazing social scheduling tool that you can access on the web and through an iPhone app. Aside from the cooler user experience and interface, sched.org also offers some unique advantages, such as synchronization with iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook, Lotus Notes and my.sxsw.com itself; integration with music recommendation engines such as Last.fm, Grooveshark and Hype Machine and integration and sharing of calendars via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Tungle. The other major advantage is the

fact that they will tell you about the huge amount of unofficial parties, unofficial concerts and even official and unofficial open bars and free food options! Crowdsourcing has done wonders for me! It took the stress out of South By Southwest and allowed me to enjoy just as much music. Some of the artists I’ve seen include: Melissa Auf der Maur, Voivod, Motorhead, Jets Overhead, Suzanne Vega, Stone Temple Pilots (although it is kinda sad to admit that one of my favorite concerts was by a band playing 20-year old songs, I have to say STP put on one of the best shows!), Los Lonely Boys, Shane Forester and Mahalia Phillips and Nexcyx from Barbados, Ruby Jane, some extreme metal by Coffinworm, Riddim Saunter and Okamoto’s at Japan Night, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (always amazing), Street Sweeper Social Club (Tom Morello’s new band, just as explosive and in your face as Rage Against The Machine were! Another highlight of the festival!), Court Yard Hounds (two thirds of the Dixie Chicks), Smokey Robinson (he’s still cruisin’!), Metric, Muse... My favorite independent acts remain Scorpion Child and Grady (both from Austin), which keep kicking ass every year! Convergence Another big trend this year seems to have been the inevitable convergence of the music world and the IT world. As music proceeds to be absorbed by the cloud and move from the physical file storage domain to the web-based streaming content domain, it becomes more obvious how traditional music jobs keep disappearing in favor of technology jobs. The future will most likely be one with even fewer A&R people, label reps, distribution reps, while all those people will be replaced by IT personnel.

RECORDING MAY 2010

http://my.sxsw.com http://www.sched.org http://www.sched.org http://my.sxsw.com http://www.Last.fm http://www.marcurselli.com

Recording - May 2010

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