For the past few years, I’ve been posting links to music samplers associated with the extravaganza that is the SXSW Music festival, here in Austin. These samplers come from record companies plugging their showcasing bands, NPR stations, and most awesomely, from the nice folks at The (Unofficial) SXSW Torrents site, who scoop up the tracks made available by SXSW itself, and package them in several juicy torrent files. In fact, downloading these torrents has been my late February ritual since 2005. They’re great fun, especially if you’re planning to attend SXSW Music, and wish to know what Moto Passion Pit sounds like before you queue up outside the frat boy bar where they’ll be playing for 50 minutes, come the middle of March.
Here’s the thing though: each year, the number of samplers that consist of downloadable files decreases, and the number of Spotify playlists and other streams increases, making my little collection of links less about music acquisition than is strictly of interest to me. This is to be expected, and I’ll save you my old person rant about how I like files better than streams.
Be that as it may, I’m honoring my commitment to provide links to downloads where I find them. We start with the unofficial torrent, whose proprietors have already warned that SXSW has moved from downloads to streaming, but that they apparently did so in mid-season, so one or two smaller torrents are available.
Watch this post for updates. I tack them onto the end, with the date of the update above each new set of links.
Enjoy!
Downloads
- Unofficial SXSW Torrents: part 1.
- OK Good Records sampler(email address required)
- The Austin 100: a 2014 mix from NPR
- SXSWBaby sampler
- DigSin sampler
- eMusic Sampler (requires eMusic membership)
Streams and Playlists
- Strax playlists: five genre-organized playlists you can stream
- f# playlist generator(Spotify SXSW playlists, generated by genre)
- KCRW Spotify list
- Digs and Company playlist
- Paste sampler(Note: this one will begin playing when you open the link)
- Dailyrindblog stream
