SXSW or South-By-Southwest is not just any normal music festival. It’s THE music pilgrimage that artists, labels and anyone that wants to be involved in the music biz makes each and every year. It’s the one place where you can catch every buzz-worthy, buzz-unworthy and buzz-hopeful act all together in one place doing their thing. It’s a literal music smorgasbord where you can gorge on all the new music you can stand.
Now that’s all well and good for the industry insiders, but what about the FANS! Because in the end, that’s really what all this is about. Getting the music to the people. And unfortunately most of us can’t take the week to go out and mingle in the biz. Not even the purveyors of this fine music outlet that you are partaking of made the journey.

But fear not noble listeners! It seems the powers that be still remember the fans and they have left us with a veritable treasure trove of music to keep your ear drums vibing ’til it’s time to do it all again next year. They have posted a free track from damn near every artist that played this year. That’s close to 1000 songs at last check. And if you dig around on the site, you can get to the list from last year as well, which makes for another 1000 songs. So it seems that there is now MORE than one place to catch all of these acts together. For instance, here are a couple of links of tracks that you’ll find in the collection:

• ‘Smart’ by Helmet
• ‘Colors’ by Amos Lee
• ‘When In Rome’ by Nickel Creek

And I’ll be the first to say, clicking on each song sucks. That would take an eternity. But they have also released the collection in a torrent so you can get the whole collection at one pop. So fire up your trusty Bittorrent application. If you don’t have one, I recommend uTorrent. It’s free, small, spyware and adware free and offers some great features. You can download it from http://www.utorrent.com/. Once you have your Bittorrent app installed and running, just use the links found here to start getting your SXSW music.

Be warned. There’s a TON of music there. And with a ton music comes quite a bit of BAD music. But I’ll guarantee that you’ll find some stuff in there that you like. Just don’t spend so much time going through that stuff that you forget about your friends here at GT.

So SXSW has passed us by for yet another year, but at least we can take away something from the festival. Big thanks to the folks at SXSW for providing this to us and also to the bands who contributed. Way to look after the fans guys and here’s looking forward to next years collection