
SXSW RIP - playhard
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/03/sxsw-rip/
======
gkoberger
Seems he's talking exclusively about SXSW Music, whereas most people in our
community probably think of SXSW Interactive (the techie-er of the three
annual SXSW events) when they hear "SXSW".

~~~
nsxwolf
I was about to post along these lines regarding my confusion. I had no idea it
was a music festival.

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chrissnell
This comment is the essence of the problem. SXSW was first and foremost a
music festival. For me, the interactive emphasis signaled the impending
decline. When my tech company employer started launching major products at
SXSW, I knew that the music festival was fucked.

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.

~~~
reeses
Amen. I had to do double takes in the past few years when I read about some
tech thing at SXSW. This year I thought there must have been a hash collision
on SXSW and I was reading about some other convention or conference.

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.

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newfund
FWIW- My thoughts are similar on SXSW interactive. I have been going for
several years, always finding that there was some amount of serendipity to
putting so many nerds and vc-types in a very small space (see PG's essay on
SV:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)).
This year I found it too chaotic. It's a nightmare to get in anywhere or know
what's going on, even if you are "VIP." I had the good fortune to be on
several groupme groups which helped though - people can tell you what's hot at
a given time. There aught to be an app...

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.

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nness
Having not yet had the opportunity to attend, what's the corporate schtick
you're noticing?

~~~
wyclif
"Like Doritos on Facebook or use hashtag #Doritos on Twitter to unlock ____."

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aashishkoirala
To the person who commented "One organizational failure in a string of massive
successes doesn't sound like a data point." in the original article - that is
exactly what a data point is. Maybe they meant to say it was not a trend or a
pattern?

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reeses
I think their wit was clouded by their desire to be a twat.

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kepano
Seems like SXSW has been pronounced dead every year for the past 5+ years.
Somehow it keeps getting bigger. It's the old Yogi Berra quote: "Nobody goes
there anymore. It's too crowded."

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yonagi
Sure, people still go, but nobody _important_ goes there anymore.

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phereford
I haven't been to SXSW in 2 years. Three years ago the technology portion of
SXSW definitely felt exactly as you described this year's music. Massively
unorganized. Massively chaotic. Couldn't really find anything you were looking
for, even if you tried.

While speakers and talks were mostly on time, the rest of it was just pure
chaos.

~~~
editer
Exactly my experience. When SXSWi moved to spread-out venues, it was suddenly
impossible to go from, say, the Convention Center to the Sheraton between
sessions, and forget about the hotel south of the lake. That signaled to me
that it was too big, but they kept making it bigger.

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ghshephard
This comment caught my attention:

 _" 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")

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TylerE
Won't happen. No amount of VR wizardry will ever replace massive arrays of 12"
woofers driven by vacuum tubes.

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skyebook
Well, the vacuum tubes have already been replaced. (I do agree with you
though)

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Jugurtha
Wrong again, not in the music scene. A lot of people still prefer amps made
out of vacuum tubes, because they feel the sound is more human, has more
texture, and is more smooth.

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.

~~~
skyebook
For a PA system? I'm pretty sure all of that is using transistors now.

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)

~~~
Jugurtha
I meant both. I've talked to guitarists/electronics engineers who design amps
for their guitars, but they're still in use, I think. If my memory serves me
well, Marshall still uses them.

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Windwaker
I can't read this site for more than 10 seconds before my eyes start to bleed.

~~~
meepmorp
Out of curiosity, how are your terminal colors configured?

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ritchiea
I use homebrew terminal colors and I still find it painful to read the type on
Jamie's blog. Font choice is a big part of it. I also turn down the opacity to
soften terminal.

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clavalle
Do people not know about all of the 'off-SXSW' stuff going on? These days it
doesn't even take knowing somebody to find out where the action is.

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hindsightbias
Austinites figured this out 10 years ago.

Really, what is it about a "Music Festival" where a band gets 30 minutes of
stage time (if they're lucky)?

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beedogs
Sounds like a simple case of not enough stages. Promoters don't seem to care,
either.

~~~
hindsightbias
Plenty of stages, too many bands shooting for their 15 minutes of fame. There
are bands playing in alleys.

One of the "greatest" discoveries and label signings at SXSW was Hanson.
Seriously.

Imagine a week with a couple hundred bands worse than Hanson.

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Grue3
I thought this post had something to do with the fact that a drunk driver
smashed into a crowd, killing a bunch of people and injuring dozens. Which
incidentally was also the cause of many reschedulings. But there is nothing
about this incident, which leads me to believe that the author was somehow
unaware of this, or he wouldn't pick such an insensitive title.

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wavesounds
All of the official shows have been crap for a long time. I have no idea why
anyone would pay $800+ for one of those passes when theres better bands
playing free shows usually with free food and drink over on the east side of
town.

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trhway
basically an old fart says "it isn't cool anymore". Well, man, if you haven't
still got the message - we're just not cool anymore, as young as we feel
ourselves. Signed by a fellow old fart (of Gen X like jwz).

~~~
jerf
"It isn't cool anymore" would be more like "I went and still saw the same
number of bands, but I'm just not feeling it... the bands just aren't as good
as they were back in the old days." This was "It was a chaotic mess, and
didn't used to be a chaotic mess". That's _more_ of an objective issue than
you're getting at.

(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.)

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infra178
Hipster.

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imjk
Hate to go on a tangent but I can't believe jwz still hasn't updated his site
to a more reader friendly color scheme.

~~~
IvyMike
Once upon a time green on black was all some of us had, 24/7.

Somehow we coped.

~~~
meepmorp
Or amber on black, depending on what what terminals were available in the lab.

As I recall, I coped with Usenet. In some ways, the Internet used to be much
better than it is now.

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reeses
That's because no one cared about the Internet back then. You could read
everything interesting on Usenet, refresh rn, have a few new articles, and
then...nothing.

The web was the same way, except that we could kill time looking for material
for our one-page sites on deformed baby skeletons.

~~~
meepmorp
Maybe I just have wider interests, but I never lacked for interesting reading
on usenet. And the trolling was better.

I still think gopher was a better way to distribute information. Also, I miss
talkd. I'll show my nostalgic self out now.

~~~
reeses
Read faster. ;>

Trolling was much, much better. There was a delicate obscenity to it that was
appreciated by the smaller community.

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scrollaway
I clicked the article thinking it was about the recent deaths at SXSW.

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?

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applecore
SXSW is a music festival. Music is the reason everyone is there.

~~~
PanMan
It used to be. Now, the interactive part is bigger than the music part.

