You don’t have to be in Texas this week to follow the action at the 26th annual South By Southwest Festival in Austin. There are plenty of other ways to experience the same set of new music drawn from over 2,000 bands playing the festival thanks to hundreds of previews, mixes and downloads. Here are the pick of the bunch. Discover your own favourite new band.
A good place to start as ever is the American radio network NPR and their always excellent home for music on the web. Their SXSW microsite (npr.org/sxsw) features a handpicked list of 100 of the best bands playing the festival playing as a continuous 7 hour mix that you can tune into at any time. It features tracks from Alabama Shakes, Cults, Hospitality, The Men, Young Prisms and more. 71 of the songs are available for free download too. Not only that but NPR’s own showcases featuring Sharon Van Etten, Dan Deacon, Magnetic Fields and Andrew Bird are being webcast for a limited time. It’s expected that Fiona Apple’s return to live music as a headliner will be available too, as long as Ms. Apple is happy with it. What a diva.
If volume is what you want SxswTorrent.com is back with BitTorrent files featuring a whopping 1,219 song downloads taken from each official band playing the festival from the SXSW website.
The long standing Stereogum blog keeps it trimmed to 25 songs from bands who they’ve championed in the past including Candy Walls from the Austra side-project TRUST and the Whigfield-sounding I’ll Never Know bounce pop from Londoner Charli XCX.
Highly recommended from the newly formed Portals Music blog collective is their SXSW 2012 sampler available for free from Bandcamp featuring some of the smaller, more underground names at the festival from the skittery dreaminess of Florida’s Hundred Waters to the catchy acoustic folk pop of You Won’t. More from SXSW 2012 next week.
Last week I concluded this column by stating that while you throttle bandwidth or block websites for people caught illegally downloading music, you’ll have a harder time changing the habits of the young people who have been downloading music for free for as long as they’ve been using the computer.
It seems the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have already recognised this and have actually produced a cirriculum for teaching respect for intellectual property and responsible use of the internet to school children.
It’s called Music Rules! and its website claims it “informs students about the laws of copyright and the risks of online file-sharing, while promoting musical and artistic creativity”.
It offers teachers and parents free materials from its site which includes activity sheets to make kids think about the effects of downloading. They range from asking the student to write down what a singer, producer or DJ would say about the effects of “songlifting” to asking them to interview friends and family about where they got their music and put the results in a chart. By the end of the cirriculum, students sign a pledge to never download music and to respect intellectual copyright law.
Continue Reading..»
