SXSW

The South by Southwest Festivals + Conferences is in mid-week running from March 11 through March 20 in my hometown Austin, TX. The number of showcased musical acts is 1,279 playing at 60 different venues around town.

For all of you music lovers out there who can't attend, what may be of interest to you is that you can obtain music from the showcased artists for free by going to the following link. So far it's over 750 full-length mp3 files.

It does require that you download and install the BitTorrent client, which is also free.

The BitTorrent client is pretty simple and neat. However, so far, it has taken me at least five days with another estimated two extra days remaining to download 2.6 GB of music. Is it painful? Absolutely! My download rate varies between 1 KB/s and 20 KB/s. Hopefully my download rate will stay high. Once that is done, I will try and keep my client open so that you might benefit from any load-balancing that is available.

Enjoy!