SXSW RIP(jwz.org) |
I really don't mean to come across as some curmudgeonly asshole but I just don't understand why every great festival ends up getting ruined by people who want to make it into something else. Why can't we be happy with simple excellence? Sundance Film Festival, for example, used to be about movies. The movies are still there but the private parties and the celebrity product giveaways and Main St. celebrity interviews on the E! channel are what most tourists come to SFF these days. It's tragic.
This year I found less interesting people and more corporate schtick. sxsw is so mainstream that Jimmy Kimmel hosted his late night show from sxsw this year. 5 years ago startups were actually using sxsw as successful launching pads, now it's Cottonelle vs. Charmin (actually 2 products that had expensive booths at sxsw this year).
That being said, I'll probably still go next year because I love Austin and many of my friends go.
It's similar to burning man though - every year people complain that it's jumped the shark because it got too corporate, and every year more people go.
This year I established 5 basic principles:
1. Absolutely no panels. Only solo or dual sessions.
2. No marketing sessions (nor sessions by marketing folks)
3. No keynotes (except for Snowden and Assange)
4. Go beyond the headline, and analyze the speaker. At minimum the person must have an interesting personal or professional story, regardless the talk.
5. The more technical or obscure the session, the better.
In the end this strategy paid off nicely. This was one of the best years, and the first to make me want to come back next year. I watched some gems like Philip Rosedale (Second Life, now High Fidelity), Pinterest engineers talking about their dev stack in a candid and informal conversation, Carl Bass from Autodesk, Print the Legend (the movie, and then the discussion with the film directors, plus Max from FormLabs and an ex-MakerBot), NASA, DARPA, nice demos at Startup Accelerator, and a lot more.
I certainly missed a few nice keynotes (like Neil deGrasse Tyson), but hopefully some of the sessions will be posted later.
I also wasn't sure if another poster was kidding about Ukranian 36-bit vinylcore bands. I couldn't find any references to those.
I suppose I really can't argue about how nice it would be to "get refreshed" in the middle of the day in Austin, so I can't hate on Cottonelle. However, their page says I have to engage in conversations with "talking bums" to earn refreshing services. I'm not kidding, check my link above.
As recently as a few years back there were a few exciting things there every year.
Maybe it's me.
While speakers and talks were mostly on time, the rest of it was just pure chaos.
"I won't be coming back. I'd have had better luck by just looking at the schedule and punching names into YouTube, then waiting for those bands to come to SF."
I wonder what the odds are we'll see within 10 years Occulus like VR environments that can capture the concert experience, reducing somewhat the need to track down bands in crazy canceling venues like this if all you are interested in is the music experience (as opposed to the Social "Concert Experience")
Also - think of all the concerts with crappy sound balancing, poor sight lines, and long lines for the bathroom.
Don't try to abstract away the experience of going to a live concert. That's the whole point.
Really, what is it about a "Music Festival" where a band gets 30 minutes of stage time (if they're lucky)?
I don't know if that's even needed now in the age of youtube.
If it is of any value still, it needs to be as well-curated as it was back when. It doesn't seem to be any more.
One of the "greatest" discoveries and label signings at SXSW was Hanson. Seriously.
Imagine a week with a couple hundred bands worse than Hanson.
(The word "more" is not extraneous, I'm not claiming some sort of "total objectivity", but I'd say that disorganization is something that can really happen beyond the realm of mere opinion.)
Just like it was interesting to suddenly see people fetishize super mario brothers about 10 years ago, e.g. Cory Doctorow. But now it seems SMB isn't the childhood reference, it's Pokemon.
The turning of the wheel I guess.
Every time there is a jwz link, this exact same comment is made.
Somehow we coped.
As I recall, I coped with Usenet. In some ways, the Internet used to be much better than it is now.
Somehow we coped.
It's someone complaining about bands. There's first world problems, and then there's "first world" first world problems. You americans are blessed with amazing conferences of all sorts especially tech, SXSW included, but god forbid the music was "not obscure enough".
Why is this even on HN?
The fact that the US has lots of conferences is a good reason to avoid the bad ones.
Here's someone complaining that the Spotify house "was too corporate"
http://techrotica.tumblr.com/post/79212740983/for-the-record...
This is the first complaint I've seen about disorganization. Most of the complaints I've heard are that the artists are too mainstream. If they're going to put on someone like Lady Gaga, they should just rent the UT football stadium and have that part be a mega festival on it's own weekend with 70k attendees. SXSW (music) has always been about the bands that could be big in about 1-2 years. You go to listen to them so that yes, you can brag to your friends that you heard them before they became famous.
They need to dial it back some.
It's like CES suddenly becoming all about crazy Ukrainian 36-bit vinylcore bands that were barely allowed into the country because CBP was afraid they'd claim asylum.
I had the same thought about Glastonbury, when they were talking about not running it a few years back, because it had got too unwieldy and a lot of the regular goers were complaining it had sold out and become too big.
As you suggest, if you could split the festival (and the crowds) in two and have one festival cover all the larger (Lady Gaga, Oasis, Rolling Stones...) or more mainstream/hyped acts along with the people who primarily aren't interested in the more obscure bands/experiences to be had away from the main stages, that would then leave the rest of the festival to the regulars who want to wonder around the green/healing fields and see all the lesser known (but often better/more interesting) bands.
I'm not sure how the logistics (or planning) would pan out given that i suspect the majority of money the festival forks out are for the bigger acts. But if they were to run these two festivals in consecutive weeks perhaps the economies of that would make it more viable.
Fortunately Glastonbury has managed to stay resolutely non-corporate, unlike most of the larger UK music festivals (V, Reading, Leeds etc.) and still manage to host a shedload of really good bands across the fame/size spectrum.
But maybe, in a similar fasion, if SXSW were to split and leave the corporate shilling to the mainstream crowd/event, maybe the other half of the festival could return to more how it was, discovering new music with people who care about new music and not having to queue for ages for the privilege?
I think what they mean by the "world" is the U.S.
2013 Glastonbury: 135,000 [0]
SXSW (music): 82,119 [1]
Neither of which compare to anything on this list[2]:
10th EXIT (NOVI SAD, SERBIA): 200,000
1st DONAUINSELFEST (VIENNA, AUSTRIA): 3,200,000
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Festival [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_by_Southwest [2] http://www.mtviggy.com/lists/the-10-biggest-music-festivals-...
So even in the US SXSW is completely dwarfed by Coachella and Summerfest.
Whether it's correct or not is not the point, but proves the point TylerE was making: This is an emotional thing. And some will make the point of theatre and cinema, but there's still theatre and theatre has never really been as interactive as a music concert / DJ on the deck anyway.
For a guitar amp, I hear you (though I also think the quality of things like guitar rig in the last few years have started to sound pretty believable)
The web was the same way, except that we could kill time looking for material for our one-page sites on deformed baby skeletons.
I still think gopher was a better way to distribute information. Also, I miss talkd. I'll show my nostalgic self out now.
Trolling was much, much better. There was a delicate obscenity to it that was appreciated by the smaller community.