South by Southwest (March 18th– 22nd) is one of the largest musical festivals in the U.S. and features what seems like a bazillion musical acts from around the globe.  The bands perform on over eighty stages in downtown Austin, Texas, all hoping to generate buzz and make it big in the coming year… unless of course they’ve already made it.

Here is the official 2009 schedule

To call is overwhelming is an understatement. I counted about 100 bands JUST listed under the letter A.  To help wade through all that madness, here are a couple of links with great pre-festival coverage.

SXSW official site:

In addition to news updates and interviews, they’ve got a great music player that streams artists all day long.

NPR’s Austin 100:

NPR listened to more than 1,000 SXSW bands.  Then they whittled those acts down to their favorite 100 songs. You can stream or view that list here. You can also download a 10-song sampler.

Austin Chronicle:

This is a fantastic site.  I love their pick/sleeper choices for each day of the festival.

Austin 360:

Tons of great SXSW blog links.

Tags: SXSW

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Feature, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.