Experience SXSW...Without Having to Go Anywhere or Do Anything

As you may have read in a previous post, I was fortunate enough to attend the awesome SXSW Interactive Festival this year. However, I was a little sad that the day we left, the totally amazing SXSW Music Festival was just getting started. Fortunately, thanks to the good people at the Internet, those of us who were not quite cool enough to be there in person this year can still enjoy a whole crap-ton [Editor's note: not to be confused with the British crappe-tonne] of awesome SXSW music.

My buddies over at imeem (whom I met in person at SXSW and who were both really nice to me) have a whole sub-site devoted to the bands of SXSW.

The hipsters at NPR were kind enough to webcast a whole bunch of shows live from Austin, and have now archived them on this awesome site which will take you hours to get through because there are so many great bands posted. You can also read some great personal coverage of the events on the All Songs Considered blog.

Not be outdone, the SXSW site has this master list of who played where on what day complete with links to sample tracks from almost all the artists. If that's not enough for you, hop on your favorite bittorrent client and head over to the "SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents" page, where you can download massive torrents featuring the showcase artists from the last 4 SXSW festivals, comprising tracks from nearly a bajillion bands in total.

And if all that's not enough, as soon as they post the podcasts for the cool music-related Interactive panels I attended, I'll be linking to those too. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Famous DC blogger (and friend of mine) Catherine Andrews has a great post on the Washingtonion "After Hours" blog about the "DC Does Texas" event at SXSW, where several DC bands took the stage and showed Texas how we rock significantly less south of the Mason-Dixon line. Features some great video and pics of the bands.