SXSW 2015 on BitTorrent: 8.42 GB of Free Music

[Scubbie]

SXSW 2015 on BitTorrent: 8.42 GB of Free Music | TorrentFreak

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For more than a decade SXSW has been sharing DRM-free songs of the performing artists, 55 GB worth so far. This year's release is the largest thus far with 1,291 tracks totaling more than eight gigabytes.

Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of DRM-free tracks from participating artists. For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents 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 archiving process. Luckily, this year all of the regular SXSW showcase MP3s are freely available again on the festival site for sampling purposes.

In common with previous years, Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to upload all of the MP3s onto BitTorrent with proper ID3 tags. The 2015 release is out now and comes in two torrents containing 1,291 tracks.

That’s 8.42 gigabytes of free music in total, which is a new record.

“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,” Stolt notes.

All the tracks released for the previous editions 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 is currently underway in Austin, Texas and ends tomorrow. The torrents, however, are expected to live on for as long as there are people sharing.

[dog-man]

Downloading these now even though I don't expect that I will like much of it as I have weird music preferences. Not exactly mainstream.

[Scubbie]

Sure they aren't mainstream and probably much of the content isn't to your choice, but it is apparently DRM free music that can be shared legally for once.

There is a range of music to pick from and I'm sure that some of it will be popular with some of the members.

I may be able to use some of it for a video or two that I intend to upload to YouTube later this year. I've already been looking around for tracks that I can use and am going through as many as possible to pick out the ones which will be of use.

[dog-man]

I meant my preference of music type is not mainstream.

More weird as my wife calls it.

[lettice]

Sure they aren't mainstream and probably much of the content isn't to your choice, but it is apparently DRM free music that can be shared legally for once.

There is a range of music to pick from and I'm sure that some of it will be popular with some of the members.

I may be able to use some of it for a video or two that I intend to upload to YouTube later this year. I've already been looking around for tracks that I can use and am going through as many as possible to pick out the ones which will be of use.

Being DRM free does not give you the right to broadcast it for free, only copying and sharing?

Nice find though, I'm always on the look for legal music, mostly for playing in the background. Spend quite a lot of time and effort on spotify trawling through some real poor quality stuff on times.
Quite a mix of genres on there and some country music too.
Really miss the country music channel we had many moons ago on sky, forget what it was called now, an mtv type country channel, some nice memories bought back.

[Scubbie]

Being DRM free does not give you the right to broadcast it for free...

Correct. I have been searching for music that I can use without being penalised.

[lettice]

freemusic and freemusicarchive have a lot of music that you can use with a free license for youtube and the like.

[Scubbie]

Thank you lettice.

I've already 'raided' incompetech's archives. I'll ave a good look through those two sites as well.