Sitting on the floor at the Austin Convention Centre while waiting to get in to Dave Grohl’s keynote speech is both an opportune and appropriate time to reflect on the first two days of SXSW Music. The middle of SXSW is “convergence day”, a one-day overlap where the interactive and music streams – or startup crowd and skinny leg jeans brigade – meet, highlighting how SXSW is both one festival and three festivals at the same time. Here are my highlights:
Advertising has 20/20 sight, but is almost completely deaf
A quick confession: we work for the same agency, albeit on different sides of the planet. That said, DJ Bunny Ears’ panel (his mum calls him Eric Johnson) was a great kick in the pants for all of us about the opportunity to use music in our work. Covering work including Converse Rubber Tracks, Hyundai Re:Generation and Mountain Dew’s Green Label Sound. This was a much needed reminder about just how much heavy lifting that music can do for our work, how much it gets the short end of the stick (“you mean we’ve got no time and no budget? AWESOME!”) and the incredible opportunities that exist to go beyond licencing and to create something great that benefits both bands and brands.
The world’s largest live music mixtape
The music programming here is incredible – The Joy Formidable sharing a bill with Local Natives, Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin? Yes please. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds playing with Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Well played. The Sound City Players? Nicely done. The incredible programming – not just in terms of the 2,000+ artists that have been invited to play here but also the way that bills are put together (I’m still getting over Dan Deacon and Alabama Shakes playing back to back at last year’s NPR showcase) is an incredible reminder that music is more popular than ever (the recorded industry just needs to find out how to make some money off of the back of this…).
Let’s get personal
While music is more popular than ever before, it’s ironic that a large part of SXSW Music is devoted to figuring out just how the industry can survive in the era of peer-to-peer sharing (interestingly Napster’s co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning were here for the world premiere of the documentary feature film Downloaded). A great panel here showed that the music industry is actually under-developed and that there’s another potential $450 million to $2.6 billion that could currently be made (I know that that’s quite a wide range, but if I were in the music industry I’d be pretty excited about another $450 million cents in sales at the moment). Who is this coming from? Largely from the fans – those people who want to engage even more with the bands they love and are using platforms such as PledgeMusic not to donate their money to the industry, but instead to gain a deeper experience with their favourite artists. Substitute “brands” for “bands” and I think that’s a pretty interesting idea that we can all use.
James Quinlan
Director of social media
DDB Australia