Recording - June 2013 - 14

the famous local BBQ restaurant and music venue Stubb’s, the
Foo Fighters leader epitomized the artist’s ability to overcome
any obstacle with the need and the will to create and communicate. As Grohl said in his keynote: “There is no right or wrong.
There is only your voice!”
Check out the full speech at http://youtu.be/Efv0Y5Fs7m4

Also at Stubb’s, legendary Australian artist Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds performed songs from their new self-released album
Push The Sky Away as part of the NPR showcase, and also
appeared on the Film Convergence Panel in conversation with
New York-based author Larry Ratso Sloman. Ten days later I saw
Nick Cave again at the Beacon Theater in New York, two days
in a row, once from the audience, once from the side of the
stage. Pretty amazing show all around!

Networking opportunities abound at the
world-famous music/film/interactive expo
By Marc Urselli and Greg Arens

You are a recording musician and an artist, and all year round
you try to find new fans for your music, to get exposure, you do
shows to find a new audience… Here you have 20,000 potential
new fans from all over the world, with whom you can interact to
introduce your music! They all came to hear new music!
I stands for interact
The keyword here is “interact”, and that is also why the interactive portion of SXSW (dubbed SXSWi) continues to grow massively from year to year. As unbelievable as it is, SXSW is in its
27th year this year and keeps on getting bigger every year in
Austin, TX, a city that stays weird and keeps growing with it! As
every year, this year’s numbers are staggering: an estimated
20,000 attendees, and thousands of bands performing within
blocks of each other in the narrow window of time between
March 8th and March 17th. The jam-packed daily schedule
starts with panels in the morning and ends with concerts, parties
and movies late at night. It’s relentless, and you must keep up!
DIYW—Do It Your Way
From the keynotes to the panels to the sidebars in the hallways, the takeaway from SXSW 2013 is DIY... or better yet,
DIYW—”Do It Your Way.” SXSW 2013 keynote speaker and
Foo Fighters mastermind Dave Grohl (a fantastic choice of
keynote speaker for this kind of festival, if I may say so!)
demonstrated how he first multitracked in his adolescent bedroom, then once again as therapy after Nirvana’s unexpected
end. Grohl recounted his progression from bedroom songwriter to DC-area punk to multiplatinum artist to documentarian (his movie SoundCity continues to get a ton of buzz!).
During his keynote he busted out an acoustic guitar and two
cassette recorders and showed how he used to multi-track himself at age 12 in his bedroom. From his inspirational and gracious speech to his performance with the SoundCity Players at
14

RECORDING June 2013

Selfmotivated go-getters
Makerbot’s Bre Prettis introduced the audience to the company’s
new Digitizer 3D Scanner, just four years after launching the company without any official affiliation. Makerbot showed that you can
move from guerilla to gorilla at SXSWi. In 2009, Pretiss demoed the
Replicator prototype at bars around town, making shot glasses that
attendees took home along with a compelling story of on-demand
manufacturing. Now he’s kicking off the whole enchilada on the big
stage (http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/08/makerbot-liveblog/) showing how 3D models can be input then refined with CAD
software courtesy of Autodesk. And each panel demonstrated that
it’s not just the means of production, but the means to promote and
distribute that are in the hands of the creators. This theme of tools
and platforms continued throughout the rests of the conference,
throughout movies and music panels as well!
Tumblr’s David Karp sounded more like Jane Jacobs than Tom
Myspace as he described the code and coda that makes his
platform friendly to both creators and curators (http://smart
blogs.com/social-media/2013/03/19/from-sxsw-tumblrfounder-david-karp-on-encouraging-creativity/). Jonah Peretti
described the social-friendly edit that has powered Buzzfeed’s
rocket-like growth in the slipstream of Facebook and Twitter
(http://www.editorsweblog.org/2013/03/13/sxsw-buzz
feeds-jonah-peretti-on-how-to-make-content-go-viral ). Nate Silver
showed how he introduced a new type of journalism to The
Gray Lady, and built his brand by turning politics into moneyball (http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/sxsw-nate-silver-discussesdata-bias-strangeness-of-fame/).
Big Data—another overarching theme at SXSWi this year—
featured again in the music marketing panel in which Cracker’s
David Lowery admitted to buying video views to game the
YouTube system; his fellow panelists from Shazam, Republic
Records, Musicmetric and Next Big Sound weighed in on how
data is essential, but can’t be taken at face value or in a vacuum (http://sidewinder.fm/post/38471894391/big-data-thenew-oil-or-the-new-snake-oil).

http://youtu.be/Efv0Y5Fs7m4 http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/08/makerbot-live-blog http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/08/makerbot-live-blog http://smartblogs.com/social-media/2013/03/19/from-sxsw-tumblr-founder-david-karp-on-encouraging-creativity/ http://smartblogs.com/social-media/2013/03/19/from-sxsw-tumblr-founder-david-karp-on-encouraging-creativity/ http://smartblogs.com/social-media/2013/03/19/from-sxsw-tumblr-founder-david-karp-on-encouraging-creativity/ http://www.editorsweblog.org/2013/03/13/sxsw-buzzfeeds-jonah-peretti-on-how-to-make-content-go-viral http://www.editorsweblog.org/2013/03/13/sxsw-buzzfeeds-jonah-peretti-on-how-to-make-content-go-viral http://www.slashdot.org/topic/bi/sxsw-nate-silver-discusses-data-bias-strangeness-of-fame/ http://www.slashdot.org/topic/bi/sxsw-nate-silver-discusses-data-bias-strangeness-of-fame/ http://www.sidewinder.fm/post/38471894391/big-data-the-new-oil-or-the-new-snake-oil http://www.sidewinder.fm/post/38471894391/big-data-the-new-oil-or-the-new-snake-oil

Recording - June 2013

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