SXSW 2008 on BitTorrent: 3.5 GB of Free Music

The South by Southwest(SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in theUnited States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released aDRM-less collection of songs that - thanks to Greg Hewgill - can now bedownloaded for free via BitTorrent.
SXSW has embraced BitTorrent as a distribution method for showcasingartists since 2005, as they release a large collection of MP3s everyyear, a few weeks before the festival.

This year, for some reason SXSW decided not to release a torrentshowcasing the artists (yet). However, all the mp3s are available fordownload on the SXSW website.Luckily, Greg Hewgill took the time and effort to put all the MP3s inone big torrent, which makes it much easier to download and share. It’sno OiNK, but it is certainly a good way to discover new artists.
Greg writes: “Since2005, I have supported the annual South by Southwest music festival byoperating a “seed” for the BitTorrent files they have created. From2005 through 2007, SXSW created the torrents themselves and hosted themon their own tracker. I learned that this year, for whatever reasonthey won’t be doing that for us.”
“So, I took matters into my own hands and have created a torrent of the 2008 showcasing artists.” Greg adds.
The torrent of the 22nd SXSW edition features MP3s from 764upcoming, as well as established artists who are scheduled to performat the festival. In total almost 3.5GB of DRM free music. All thetorrents previously released by SXSW are also available for download.
For those who are interested, this year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 12-16, in Austin Texas.