Amidst all the startups and tasteless PR stunts, it’s easy to forget that South by Southwest is technically a music festival. Thankfully, the organisers didn’t forget, and have continued their years-old tradition of releasing all the music, DRM-free.
Since 2005, SXSW has made music from participating artists freely available as MP3 downloads. Since manually downloading files is a pain, another annual tradition is the public compiling all the files into torrents, which are much easier to download. It’s also a fun yearly reminder that BitTorrent doesn’t need to be completely synonymous with illegal piracy.
This year’s music is available in two torrent files, together totaling 10.33GB of music. Yes, stockpiling MP3s does sound a little 2006, but then again, Tidal might one day succeed, so you never know when you’ll need an emergency stockpile of music.
[SXSW Torrent via TorrentFreak]