Despite the jittery economy and the decade-long recording industry slump, the festival grows bigger every year. Around 2,000 bands are playing in this year’s 23rd installment, which began on Wednesday night and continues through Sunday. Seemingly every paved inch downtown becomes a stage, and from noon until the wee hours the air along Red River and East Sixth Streets is filled with the din of rough rock music and the smell of free- flowing liquor.
But for the young bands that come in pursuit of a big break — or, more likely, a small break — South by Southwest is also hard work, a five-day gantlet of makeshift showcases and insufficient sound checks. And musicians and industry players alike say success is tricky to gauge in an era when fame from a commercial placement or a rush of blog postings can disappear as quickly as it comes.
Crocodiles, a two-man band from San Diego so fresh that the head of their record label was seeing them perform live for the first time, have had an enviable streak of Internet attention in the last few months. In December the underground art-punk kings No Age picked a Crocodiles song as one of their favorites of 2008, and after Crocodiles signed with Fat Possum Records in January two influential outlets, the blog Stereogum (stereogum.com) and Fader magazine’s blog (thefader.com), weighed in with effusive recommendations of the band’s throbbing wash of guitars and electronics.
Many bands dream of this kind of reception. But over the four or five years that blogs have been the dominant tastemakers of independent music, artists have gradually become more wary of the hype-and-slam cycle of the Web. Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell of Crocodiles have been so distrustful of the Internet’s fickle power that at first they tried to keep as low an online presence as possible, going so far as to ask fans to remove YouTube videos of their shows.
“The Internet is taking all the romance out of music and art and replacing it with this revolving door that just revolves so fast,” Mr. Welchez, 27, the duo’s singer, said before a 20-minute showcase on Wednesday afternoon. Eventually, though, the Internet found them, and their MySpace plays quickly shot into the tens of thousands.
Artists, labels, journalists and everyone else at South by Southwest now depend on the Internet for almost every aspect of their jobs, from discovery to communication, distribution to promotion. But on the patios and hotel rooftops of Austin the conversation often turns to debates about what the Internet’s role should be.
