| South by Southwest | |
|---|---|
| Location | Austin, Texas, USA |
| Language | International |
| Official website | |
South by Southwest (SXSW) is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring (usually in March) in Austin, Texas, United States with the exception of SXSWeco which takes place in October. SXSW first began in 1987 and is centered on the downtown Austin Convention Center. Each of the three parts runs relatively independently, with different start and end dates. In 2011, the conference lasted for ten days, with interactive lasting for five, music for six, and film lasting the longest at nine days.
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SXSW Music is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with more than 2,000 performers playing in more than 90 venues around downtown Austin over four days, in March. SXSW Music offers artist-provided music and video samples of featured artists at each festival via their official YouTube channel.[1][2]
SXSW Film has become one of the world's premier film festivals, focusing on new directing talent.
Similarly, SXSW Interactive has attracted a strong following among web creators and entrepreneurs. Its focus on emerging technology has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. According to festival co-organizer Louis Black, SXSW Interactive "has probably been the biggest of its kind in the world" since 2007.[3]
The music event has grown from 700 registrants in 1987 to nearly 12,000 registrants. SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive events have grown every year, most recently bringing around 15,000 to 20,000 registrants to Austin every March.[4]
Collectively, SXSW is the highest revenue-producing special event for the Austin economy, with an estimated economic impact of $167 million in 2011.[5][6]
In July 1986, the organizers of the New York City music festival New Music Seminar contacted Roland Swenson, a staffer at the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle, about organizing an extension of that festival into Austin. The plans did not materialize, so Swenson decided to instead co-organize a local music festival, with the help of two other people at the Chronicle: editor and co-founder Louis Black, and publisher Nick Barbaro. Louis Meyers, a booking agent and musician, was also brought on board.[7] Black came up with the name, as a play on the name of the Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest. The event was first held in March 1987. The organizers considered it a regional event and expected around 150 attendees to show up, but over 700 came, and according to Black "it was national almost immediately."[3]
Meyers left Austin and the festival in the early 1990s, but Black, Barbaro and Swenson remained the festival's key organizers as of 2010.[3]
Singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked was the keynote speaker at the 1992 South by Southwest. She caused controversy by delivering a speech, written by her then-husband Bart Bull, criticizing white musicians for stealing music from African-American artists; and then later during the same conference when she tried to kick the band Two Nice Girls off of a benefit concert, a move that some called anti-gay, due to Two Nice Girls' overtly lesbian image.[8]
In 1993, SXSW moved into the Austin Convention Center, where it is still held.[9]
In 1994, SXSW added a component for film and other media, named the "SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference".[3]
That year, the three brothers of the band Hanson were brought to SXSW by their father in order to perform impromptu auditions for music executives, in the hopes of getting industry attention. Among the people who heard them was A&R executive Christopher Sabec, who became their manager, and would soon afterward get them signed to Mercury Records.[10]
In 1995 the SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference was split into two separate events, "SXSW Film" and "SXSW Multimedia".[3]
In 1999, SXSW Multimedia was renamed "SXSW Interactive".[3]
Singer-songwriter John Mayer's performance at the 2000 SXSW Music festival led to his signing soon thereafter with Aware Records, his first record label.
A performance by the band The Polyphonic Spree at the 2002 SXSW Music festival helped bring them to national attention before they had signed with a major label.[11]
At the 2002 SXSW Film Festival, the film Manito won the jury award for narrative feature, while the documentary Spellbound won the jury award for documentary feature.
British singer James Blunt was discovered by producer Linda Perry while playing a small show at the 2004 SXSW Music festival, and was signed to Perry's Custard Records soon thereafter,[12] where he would go on to release all three of his subsequent albums.
The 2005 SXSW Film is considered by some to be the origin of the mumblecore film genre. A number of films now classified as mumblecore, including The Puffy Chair and Mutual Appreciation, screened there, and Eric Masunaga, a musician and the sound editor on Mutual Appreciation, is credited with coining the term "mumblecore" at a bar while at the festival.[13]
The film Hooligans won both the Feature Film Jury Award and the Feature Film Audience Award for narrative feature, while The Puffy Chair won the Feature Film Audience Award in the "Emerging Visions" category.
A secret concert at the 2006 SXSW Music by the band The Flaming Lips was called one of the "Top 10 Music-Festival Moments" of all time by Time magazine in 2010.[14]
The 2006 SXSW Interactive featured a keynote panel of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.[15]
That year, "Screenburn at SXSW", a component for video games, was added to SXSW Interactive.[3]
The 2007 music festival took place from March 14 to 18, and more than 1,400 acts performed.
Two of the top film premieres that year were Elvis and Anabelle and Skills Like This.
The social media platform Twitter notably gained a good deal of early traction and buzz at the 2007 SXSW Interactive,[16] though it did not launch there, as is sometimes reported.[3]
The 2008 SXSW Interactive got media attention due to a keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by technology journalist Sarah Lacy that was considered by some observers to be a "train wreck" due to an audience perception that Lacy was asking uninteresting questions, as well as mocking or terse answers in response from Zuckerberg.[17]
The 2009 festival was held March 13–22. In 2009, the Interactive section of SXSW in particular drew larger attendance levels. This influx of tech-savvy attendees seriously strained the networks of providers such as AT&T (primarily due to heavy iPhone usage).[18] Also new was the founding of an international organization for those not attending, dubbed NotAtSXSW. Coordinating through Twitter and other online tools, notatsxsw events were held in London, New York, Wisconsin, Portland, Oregon and Miami.[19]
The 2009 SXSW Interactive saw the launch of the Foursquare application, which was called "the breakout mobile app" of the event by the Mashable blog.[20]
The 2009 SXSW Film screened 250 films, including 54 world premieres. The event was notable for having the United States premiere of the film The Hurt Locker, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010.[3] The winners of the feature jury awards were, for documentary feature, "45365", and for narrative feature, Made in China.[21]
The 2010 music festival, which took place March 12–21, was dedicated to Alex Chilton, who died shortly before he was to perform with Big Star. A tribute concert was performed in his honor on March 20, 2010.[22]
At the 2010 festival, nearly 2,000 bands were officially scheduled to perform,[23] and festival reps estimated that over 13,000 industry representatives attended.[24] Though traditionally the Austin Music Awards kick off the festival, that year organizers slated it as the closing act. Local musician Bob Schneider earned 6 awards, including Song of the Year, Singer of the Year, and Band of the Year (with Lonelyland.)[23] The 2010 festival was also notable for appearances by the surviving members of the band Moby Grape.[25]
At the 2010 Film festival, Magnolia Pictures bought the film rights to the science-fiction film Monsters on the night it screened, in what was the first-ever "overnight acquisition" at SXSW. Journalist Meredith Melnick of Time magazine called this purchase a turning point for SXSW, leading to a greater interest among film studio executives in attending the festival in person.[26]
The 2010 Interactive festival had an estimated 12-13,000 paying attendees, which represented a 40% jump over the previous year.[27] This was the first year in which the interactive festival's attendance surpassed the music festival's.[27] The keynote presentation was an interview of then-Twitter CEO Evan Williams by Umair Haque, an interview that many in the audience found disappointingly superficial.[28] Also during the interactive festival, the first-ever (and so far only) "Hive Awards For the Unsung Heroes of the Internet" were held.
The 2011 SXSW festival ran from March 11 to 20.
The keynote presenter for SXSW Interactive was Seth Priebatsch, founder and CEO of the mobile-gaming platform SCVNGR.[29] The 2011 Interactive festival was by far the largest it had ever been, with an estimated 20,000 attendees.[30]
Also in attendance at SXSW was boxing legend Mike Tyson, promoting his new iPhone game with RockLive at the Screenburn Arcade [31]
At least two films screened at the SXSW Film festival gained distribution deals there: the documentary Undefeated and the thriller The Divide. As a result, film critic Christopher Kelly wrote that in 2011, SXSW Film went from being "a well-regarded but fundamentally regional event" to having "joined the big leagues of film festivals around the world."[32]
The March 15 screening of the Foo Fighters documentary Back and Forth was followed by a surprise live performance by the band itself, with a setlist that included the entirety of the then-upcoming albumWasting Light.[33]
SXSW has inspired similar festivals elsewhere, including 35 Conferette (formerly known as "North by 35" or "NX35") in Denton, Texas, North by Northeast (NXNE) in Toronto, North by Northwest (NXNW) in Portland, Oregon, West by Southwest (WXSW) in Tucson, Arizona and Incubate (formerly known as "ZXZW") in Tilburg, The Netherlands.