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Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s

We linked to SXSW’s music showcase a few weeks ago. Even if you’re not going to (or already at) SXSW, it’s a great way of finding new music. But even for us, that’s a lot of music to look through.

Enter Paul Ford. In this article for The Morning News, he downloads and listens to all 763 tracks offered by the SXSW people and gives them a rating out of 5, and reviews them in six words. (Unrelated: He also writes six word Twitter updates.) As well as the reviews, there are also a number of charts, like rating distribution (average rating was 2.42 out of 5) and genre distribution, and other fun statistics, like all the bands with “ghost” or “fish” in their name, and various other things. They’re refreshing interludes in a list 763 items long.

If SXSW’s showcase was a good way of finding new music, this is a great way of finding new music.

All Songs Considered SXSW Preview

NPR’s All Songs Considered SXSW preview is well worth checking out. They’ve got an interview with Carrie Brownstein and Stephen Thompson, followed by an interview with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. On top of that, they’ve got 17 tracks from artists performing at SXSW available for streaming.

My advice is listen to all of them, but if you want recommendations, you can’t miss Bon Iver, Fanfarlo, Times New Viking, and Tift Merritt. And, of course, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t recommend Vampire Weekend (we postedthe music video for the song NPR are streaming, “A-Punk”, a few days ago).

If you’re not at SXSW, like me, you could do worse than subscribing to the NPR All Songs Considered podcast. They’ve promised broadcasts and webcasts of almost two dozen SXSW concerts:

NPR Music and All Songs Considered will be in Austin next week, blogging, broadcasting and webcasting nearly two dozen live concerts. You’ll hear R.E.M., My Morning Jacket, Jens Lekman, Vampire Weekend and many more, all webcast live on NPR.org.

SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents

Almost every year, the guys behind the SXSW music festival create a torrent of all the music they have in the website showcase. The torrent includes single tracks for a lot of the artists due to play the festival. This year, for whatever reason, they haven’t done that, so Greg Hewgill did instead. He writes:

So, I took matters into my own hands (after all, the songs are all available for download) and have created a torrent of the 2008 showcasing artists, which is one .mp3 file from 764 different artists. This year, it is almost 3.5 GB of new music, for free.

You can download it from here, along with the torrents for previous years.

The full listing of artists, and links to individual mp3s, is available here. And what an excellent lineup it is. Here are 5 of my personal picks from the lineup (though I haven’t listened to anywhere near everything on offer yet), that I don’t think have been mentioned on Tuneage before:

I’ve tried to stick to artists with mp3s uploaded, but a few don’t. You should be able to find something by just about all of them at Hype Machine.