Well, we’ve done it. Booked tickets and bought our Interactive pass. Swift.fm is taking its second-ever field trip, to the weirds and wilds of Austin, TX for the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. In our quest to socialize music – making music as easy to pass through your networks as news – we’ve decided to wade into the overwhelming party / conference / jamboree that is SXSW. Here’s hoping we don’t get tinnitus.
The bigger picture for us is facilitating music discovery. For everyone physically at SXSW, it’s going to be impossible to see and do it all. For music fans attending only digitally, it’s a bonanza of great music and gossip, and what better way to attend, reminisce, or save for later than to compile lists of the tracks you hear, socially? Think of Swift.fm as a way to digitally divide and conquer the free-for-all that is SXSW.
We’re actively encouraging artists, labels, media outlets and fans to use the #sxsw tag when uploading tracks from SXSW to Swift.fm. Not only does this categorize great music (pro tip: use any #tag you want to categorize music any which way, e.g. #hiphop or #radiohead), but it also will create a vibrant record of SXSW 2010, in real time, tweet-by-tweet. What’s best is that anyone can to go http://www.swift.fm/channel/sxsw and listen to every last community-tagged song there, so the music gets extended past each of our users’ individual networks and out to everyone using Swift.fm. Sweet.
If you’re going to be in Austin, we’d love to meet you. Holler at us either by tweeting @swiftfm or drop us an email to info [at] swift.fm.
Happy Discovery,
Ed & the Swift.fm Team
