Grab 8GB worth of songs from the SXSW 2017 Festival
The SXSW music festival is a long standing event at which hundreds of artists perform each year to festival goers.
Music is also made available on the SXSW website, and it is also made available as one huge torrent package each year.
We talked about this back in 2012 in Download More Than 35 Gigabyte Of Free SXSW Festival Music already.
A torrent is created each year featuring songs that artists performed during the festival. The archive dates back to 2005, and the most recent torrent just got uploaded to the site.
 SXSW 2017 Festival Music Torrent
The SXSW 2017 torrent features a massive list of 1201 mp3 songs from hundreds of artists. You may not have heard of most of the artists, unless you are into independent or local music.
While that may make you shy away from the torrent, 8 Gigabytes may take a while to download, it may also help you discover music that you'd never come into contact with otherwise.
Still, it is a shot in the dark. One thing that you may do is visit the official SXSW music site, the Music Bloggers Guide to SXSW, or SXSWFM, an online radio station that streams music 24/7.
Especially the radio station may be useful, as you can let it play in the background while you are doing other things on your computer. It highlights artist and track names which helps you further.
If you check out the SXSW torrent website, unofficial as it states, then you will notice that you can grab torrents from 2005 to 2017. Back in 2012, you could use the site to grab 35 gigabytes of music. Another 39 or so Gigabytes were added in the past five years, so that you may grab about 75 Gigabytes of free music from the site all in all. That's thousands of songs from a lot of artists.
Closing Words
The SXSW torrents have a lot to offer, but it is mostly a shot in the dark as the performing artists are probably best classified as independent or local, and not superstars. This does not mean that the music is bad, only that you will have to listen to the music to find out whether you like it or not.
If you like music discovery, or are a collector of music, then you will certainly want to start up your favorite torrent application to download music from SXSW.
If you are not, you are probably better off listening to the Internet radio station instead.
Now You: Have you downloaded SXSW music before?
I attend SXSW every year. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a yearly 10 day music/movie festival in Austin Texas (thus South by Southwest) that is a week long music party with the two weekends as start and finish. Yes there are a lot of independent names and labels, but mainstream names also appear. There is also a parallel film festival and TED experience at the same time as well. This is the largest music/media related event in the US and is considered the Mardi Gras of music.
The music is worth checking out, you will certainly find acts that will be famous in a couple of years, as well as actors and producers giving lectures on recent film releases. I wasn’t aware of this massive download, but since I’m a yearly visitor it’s certainly something I’ll look into. Thanks Martin, nice find all the way from Germany.
Jojo, thanks for pointing out Linn Classical as a source. I am listening to the playlist at 333 kbps using the latest MPC-HC x64 program. Fantastic quality I’ve never heard before.
All the Linn stations broadcast at 320 kbps. There is a Linn Jazz and a Linn Radio. Linn is a record producers and sound equipment manufacturer in the UK. Much (all?) of what they play is from their own catalog. They have an interesting website at: http://radio.linnrecords.com/index2.html
The Greek station Audiophile Classical is at 320 kbps also, though the stream can be a bit flaky at time. However, I really like their music selection compared to many other classical stations.
AUDIALS and Radio.net (at least) show the bitrate with the station so you can choose.
Direct Link : http://www.sxswtorrent.com/SXSW_2017_Showcasing_Artists_Part1.torrent?attredirects=0
@Henk Van Setten
Cars are used for robbing banks. Does that mean that cars are illegal?
Books have been used for illegal propaganda and to incite hatred. Does that mean books are illegal? or bad?
I will question the sample used in that Australian Ballarat Study. You can make any statistics point to any direction your study wants to show. Torrents can be used for legal and illegal content. It is up to you to determine whether you are willing to understand the risks
Because needles are used by drug addicts and unsavory types, I will never get a shot, even if it means I will die. That is how stupid that sounds.
The whole point is that in 99% of all cases, these torrent “needles” are actually filled and dispensed by “unsavory types”. Would I as a healthy person accept some needle when there is a 99% chance it’s been filled with a virus from a dubious source? Now what’s so hard to understand here?
The Ballarat University study (from way back in 2010) was based on searches of “Torrentz.com”. Really, how reputable do you think that site could have been? Any site that was known to be a search engine including torrents of pirated material was absolutely going to be trafficked primarily by people seeking pirated material. People interested in legitimate torrents were not using “Torrentz.com”.
It’s pretty hilarious to leap from a study that claimed copyright infringement in 89% of torrents, to saying there’s a “99% chance it’s been filled with a virus”!! The study you cite didn’t say anything about malware.
If you say things so illogical, people are going to argue with you.
Where did they pick the torrents from? How did they search for torrent files? How can 1000 torrents be an accurate representation of practically infinite number of torrent files in existence? These researches are misleading in that they try very hard to convey the agenda that torrent = bad. In a similar manner, if the “researchers” searched for porn on Google they would conclude that internet must be mostly porn!
Because of its predominant use by crooks, criminals, virus spreaders, and illegal stuff peddlers, the torrent protocol is disabled and blocked on all my computers. Of course I don’t even have an app for downloading torrents. I am not going to change this for a stack of songs!
I don’t know a thing about SXSW. But if they are serious and legal, then it beats me why they didn’t find a more accepted and more acceptable way to let people download their music.
BitTorrent is just a protocol for transferring large files to many people efficiently and cheaply. There is nothing more dangerous or illegal about it as HTTP.
@someone: You should learn to read. I did not say that torrents are dangerous or illegal as a protocol. I just said that I won’t allow this protocol or any of its torrent files on my PC because in real life this particular protocol is used nearly exclusively for illegal, shady activities. And let me add, obviously this shadiness is provoked by factors such as the senders-receivers obfuscating potential of this protocol.
So, are you really going to deny my simple statement of a well-proven fact?
In 2010, an Australian Ballarat university study showed that out of 1000 tested torrent files only 3 (0,3%) contained proven legal content, while 890 (89%) contained proven illegal content. This confirmed a study from Princeton university which that showed that from over 1000 torrent files, 99% were illegal and often from dubious origin.
Just google a bit and you will find these well-founded research results and more, plus the pathetic efforts of diehard law-breakers to deny those results.
Of course you’re welcome to bury your head in the sand and keep denying the all-too obvious truth.
@Ted: your reasoning defies basic logic. The true fact that torrents /might/ be used for legal ends, does not diminish the equally true fact that in daily practice, torrents are used nearly always for illegal ends.
Also, I did not say that technology is the source of evil. Obviously not the torrent technology, but the average torrent /users/ are the source of that evil. But in real life this does not make torrents any less dangerous: on the contrary.
Agreed. BitTorrent can be used for many legal practices. If you get it in your mind that technology is the source of evil, than you should rethink what you use to be more productive.
Never knew of this radio station. I normally listen to only two stations – classical from Venice Italy and mostly old time American music from US. Sounds like I’ll be adding sxswfm from what I’ve heard so far, although the 110 kbps sound isn’t as high as I’d prefer.
You can also get lots of free music here:
https://archive.org/details/etree
I’ve downloaded a bunch of Dead concerts successfully.
Good point, mentioned this here: https://www.ghacks.net/2011/04/25/download-free-music-legally-an-updated-guide/
Since more than 5 years old, seems like a good time to review and update your past story.
I suggest adding free internet radio aggregators like radio.net, Audials and Tunein that run on IOS or Android (Audials also runs on the PC, maybe other platforms).
I listen to stations all over the world. Some of my favorite stations include:
– Doowop Cafe Radio (USA)
– Doowop Radio (USA)
– Linn Classical (Ireland?)
– Chroma Opera
– Müpa Symphony (Hungry)
– Audiophile Classical (Greece)
– CMBF – Radio Musical De Cuba
– ABC Jazz (Australia)
– Radio Symphony (USA)
– Radio Classic (Romania)
I could go on but the point is that there is a huge variety across all genres of free music that you can listen to and even record via the apps mentioned above. Many have no advertising. There is no need to pay for services like Pandora, Spotify and all the rest.
Good idea Jojo, I’m on it.