11 years. 11,000 songs. 55GB – The ultimate SXSW Music archive.
The SXSW (South by Southwest) music festival is one of the largest and most popular around. For more than a decade, the festival has been sharing DRM-free songs of its performing artists, 55 GB worth so far. This year’s release is the largest thus far featuring 1,291 tracks totaling more than eight gigabytes.
Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of DRM-free tracks from participating artists – the first torrents were created by the festival organizers for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been in the hands of the public.
In 2014 SXSW replaced the MP3 files with Soundcloud links, which complicated the download process. Thankfully in 2015 all the regular SXSW showcase MP3s are again freely available on the festival site for you to sample the music of the bands that played at this year’s festival.
“These torrents include tracks that can be previewed on the SXSW website for SXSW 2015. This year’s includes 1,291 files totaling 8.42GB, making it the largest to date,” notes Ben Stolt the man who, as in previous years, has taken the time and effort to upload all of the MP3s onto BitTorrent with proper ID3 tags. “The torrents are provided as an alternate means to sample the songs available on the official SXSW site” continues Stolt. The 2015 release is out now and comes in two torrents containing a massive 1,291 tracks. That’s 8.42 gigabytes of free music in total.
All the tracks released for the previous eleven festivals dating back to 2005 are also still available for those people who want to fill up their MP3 players without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2015 archives now total more than 55 gigabytes.
Every year SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading gigabytes of free music across virtually every genre from both established acts and upcoming bands.
This year’s SXSW music festival has finished but the music will live on for as long as there are people sharing.