SXSW 2015 on BitTorrent: 8.42 GB of Free Music

[shamu726]

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.

Source: TorrentFreak

[Joe13]

Note that the filenames and ID3 tags were updated to properly reflect the artist names and song titles.

The first torrent was seeded February 18, 2015 and the second on March 12, 2015.

• SXSW_2015_Showcasing_Artists_Part1.torrent - 844 files - 5.41GB
• SXSW_2015_Showcasing_Artists_Part2.torrent - 447 files - 3.01GB

Note that 64 tracks that were included in the first torrent were no longer available on the SXSW website as of the release date of the second torrent. That list is here for reference.

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