A Short Comment about the SXSW Music Festival, and a Large Torrent

This is A Short Comment about the SXSW Music Festival, and a Large Torrent. A large torrent that is legal, and contains songs from many of the artists that are performing at SXSW Music Festival this year, coincidentally. The festival itself really is quite an awesome thing. You can read about it here. The torrent is cool because it's legal and free, and it is fucking huge. I downloaded it a couple of days ago, and I now find myself on song #91 by Brent Palmer. I think I'll be lucky if I make it to song #756 by Zykos, because basically





basically I have 665 more songs to listen to before I get to the end. It's cool though, because a lot of these songs are pretty awesome and most definitely from a good amount of different genres. If one was trying to start a music collection or looking for a place to get stuff to put on their iPod or iWhatever Portable Music Player they fancy without being prosecuted by the RIAA, this would be a good place to start. Especially if these people are wanting to listen to stuff they might not hear on the radio or on MTV, and things they might actually enjoy for their quality, not because their friends enjoy them (because their friends in turn happen enjoy them, and no one knows who likes what and why and most of it is actually full of suck).

Anyway, if you're interested, there is a Wired article here that you can check out.

That article in turn, links to the site where the torrents are available, which can be found here.

This is 2.6 Gigabytes of music, folks. It won't be done quickly, but if you're lucky it'll be done overnight and I think it's highly worth it. If you're looking for a Bittorrent client (How else will you download the music?), I recommend Bitcomet. Some people find the idea of torrents to be a bit daunting because they are not quite as simple as point at what you want and click it to download. It's more like "point at what you want, click to download the torrent file, and wait a few hours for the torrent to do the legwork, and then be a good neighbor to other people downloading the torrent by seeding it for a while", but once you get into it, it is not very complex.

Anyhow, this is longer than I was expecting, and I've made my way all the way down to a band called Buried at Sea. They have a 15 minute-long song in this collection that is not really my style, so I'm considering skipping it.