For a decade, Adam and I went to South by Southwest for music every year. It was where we did most of our music discovery for the year. For those who aren’t familiar, people often refer to SXSW as a music “festival,” which isn’t really accurate. This isn’t a Coachella-like experience. It’s a music discovery conference that used to be mostly for people in the industry. The SXSW organizers would curate a list of around 1,500 mostly-unknown artists from around the world, and this was their chance to play in front of critics and people who run labels and venues – music industry tastemakers – in very intimate settings. Just about every bar, church, and coffee shop in downtown Austin is turned into an ad hoc music venue for the 6 days of showcases. I’ve seen artists who went on to become huge in a room with 50 people in it.

Planning our schedule would involve months of research ahead of time. On the basis of hearing a song or two, or someone else’s recommendation, the bands we wanted to see would go on my spreadsheet. Because the showcases are happening simultaneously from about noon to 2am every day, I would put about 200 acts on my list, but we would only be able to see about 100 of them. But still – 100 new bands! And several of them would always end up being favorites that I followed for years.

We kept track of our contemporaneous notes and photos via a Tumblr blog I set up in 2013. Looking through the blog, there are some I’ll never forget, and some I don’t remember at all. The best part of the event was that because bands played 40-minute sets back-to-back, we’d often find that a particular venue was off-schedule, and we would end up seeing someone that wasn’t even on our list, who turned out to be amazing.

Anyway, the SXSW organizers announced last week that they would be dramatically curtailing the event. The Music portion would be happening at the same time as “Interactive” and “Film,” which is terrible because the 1-2 nights that Music overlaps with Interactive were always the worst. You’d have tech people standing in front of the stage, yelling over the band, trying to “network.” The idea of having them around for the whole Music week is enough to make me not want to go back.

NPR’s “All Songs Considered” did an episode about what’s happening, their SXSW memories, and what these changes mean for the future of independent music. There was also a good article in the Texas Monthly, which is paywalled, so I copied it to a .doc here: “SXSW is Finally Changing. Is It Too Little, Too Late?"

The reality is, SXSW was already ending. One of the big issues is that Austin has exploded in growth during the last couple decades. SXSW used to take over Sixth Street, with all the venues adjacent to one another. But as Austin became more of a “party town,” where legions of basic bitches and bros would come for their bachelorette parties, etc., the Sixth Street bars found that it was more lucrative to just stay open as a bar rather than serving as a SXSW venue. As a result, the venues ended up being pushed farther East and South, which defeated the whole purpose of having them very close together so you could run from venue to venue to catch different performances. Having to walk a mile between showcases really puts a damper on both planning and spontaneity. And walking around a city where hordes of people were just there to get drunk was a far cry from the wonderfully weird Austin of the 90s, when SXSW got started. “Slacker” is now a historical documentary.

We hadn’t been to SXSW since 2023 because in 2024, I was leaving for my month-long 50th birthday trip in May, and this year (2025), I am working on a big project that will be in crunch time during the time that SXSW occurs. We had been excited to finally go back in 2026, but it sounds like the event will really be a shell of its former self. Maybe a smaller SXSW will be better – it had gotten a bit too big. Maybe the reduced scope will drive away the “Interactive” people and only the music (and film!) die-hards will show up. Anyway, we have time to decide.