SXSW 2017 on BitTorrent: 7.86 GB of Free Music

[shamu726]

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States and for the thirteenth year in a row, SXSW is sharing DRM-free tracks of the performing artists. This year's release features 1,201 tracks and can be downloaded for free in one go, with help from "SXSW Torrents."

 

Starting in 2005, the SXSW music festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.

 

The festival was, in fact, one of the first mainstream outlets to embrace torrents.

 

During the early years the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been taken over by the public.

 

While torrents are no longer the standard, SXSW’s showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes.

 

For the past several years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all of the MP3s on BitTorrent. Last week he published the latest 2017 torrent, which consists of 1,201 tracks totaling 7.86 gigabytes of free music.

 

All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available and most of these torrents remain well-seeded. The 2005 – 2017 archives now total more than 77 gigabytes.

 

Stolt previously told TorrentFreak that he spends several hours preparing the releases each year, in part for his personal pleasure.

 

“My motivation is in part selfish, because, like many others, my friends and I all use the contents of the torrent to prepare for our week at SXSW Music. But without fail the emails start coming in January and February asking if there will be a torrent,” Stolt said.

 

“Many people come back every year, so I can’t leave them hanging,” he adds.

 

The effort pays off, though. Many people love the SXSW torrents, which attract tens of thousands of downloaders each year. The SXSW torrents site also gets quite a bit of traffic, over a million visits thus far.

 

For some, the showcase torrent is a good consolation for not being able to attend the festival in person. Others see it as a yearly tradition that allows them to fill up their hard drive and check out recent music from new and established artists for free.

 

This year’s SXSW music festival is currently underway in Austin, Texas and ends on Sunday. The torrent, however, is expected to live on for many years, as long as people are sharing.

 

 

Source: TorrentFreak

 

[steven36]

What's the big deal about downloading legal music from BitTorrent ?  there's tons of it  you can download direct download without using p2p that's kind of like using p2p to download a Linux distro I never do  i just use direct links . Once these artist if they hit the big time and sign a record deal then anything they put out after  becomes illegal to download anyway in most places . Even back in the 80s and early 90s it was  illegal to make mixed tapes or borrow a friends cassette or cd and dub it  but that never stopped  no one . Back when Napster was the thing taking people to court didn't stop it, the only thing that stopped it was them taking Napster to court . Punishing the the little fish has never done any good,  

[straycat19]

57 minutes ago, steven36 said:

Even back in the 80s and early 90s it was  illegal to make mixed tapes or borrow a friends cassette or cd and dub it  but that never stopped  no one .

 

It actually goes back to the 60s when we were using reel to reel tape decks, some as small as two inch reels, to record and copy music from vinyl or from radio and sharing those tapes with each other.  Most places that sold music back then had a listening booth where you could listen to the latest album from a group before buying it.  It was easy to sneak a small 2 inch reel to reel battery operated recorder into the booth and plug its input into the output jack and record it while pretending to listen to the music through the headphones.  When Akai came out with the Cross Head reel to reel deck in the late 60s it allowed even better quality recording and better copies.  The only difference between then and now is no one cared back then and no one was ever arrested/sued for making copies.

[steven36]

1 hour ago, straycat19 said:

It actually goes back to the 60s

I'm not this old to even know this, I do remember back when I was a kid in the 70s someone having reel to reel tape deck with a Cheech and Chong tape but back in the 70s 8track was the thing and I remember someone  having a stereo that could dub LPs  and radio to blank 8 tracks  and i remember them selling bootleg 8 tracks back then

 

Actually Bootleg music goes back to the the 19th century but really didn't become  popular tell 1969
 

Quote

 

The concept of releasing unauthorised performances had been established before the 20th century, but reached new levels of popularity with Bob Dylan's Great White Wonder, a compilation of studio outtakes and demos released in 1969 using low-priority pressing plants. The following year, the Rolling Stones' Live'r Than You'll Ever Be, an audience recording of a late 1969 show, received a positive review in Rolling Stone. Subsequent bootlegs became more sophisticated in packaging, particularly the Trademark of Quality label with William Stout's cover artwork. Compact disc bootlegs first appeared in the 1980s, and internet distribution became increasingly popular in the 1990s.

 

The first popular rock music bootleg resulted from Bob Dylan's activities between largely disappearing from the public eye after his motorcycle accident in 1966, and the release of John Wesley Harding at the end of 1967. After a number of artists had hits with Dylan songs that he had not officially recorded and released himself, demand increased for these recordings, particularly when they started airing on local radio in Los Angeles. Through various contacts in the radio industry, a number of pioneering bootleggers managed to buy a reel to reel tape containing a selection of unreleased Dylan songs intended for distribution for music publishers and wondered if it would be possible to manufacture them on an LP. They managed to convince a local pressing plant to press between 1,000 and 2,000 copies discreetly, paying in cash and avoiding using real names or addresses. Since the bootleggers could not commercially print a sleeve, due to it attracting too much attention from recording companies, the LP was issued in a plain white cover with Great White Wonder rubber stamped on it.Subsequently, Dylan became one of the most popular artists to be bootlegged with numerous release

 

Bootlegs have been prohibited by federal law (17 USC 1101) since the introduction of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA, PL 103-465) in 1994, as well as by state law. The federal bootleg statute does not pre-empt state laws, which also apply both prior to and since the passage of the federal bootleg statute. The US v. Martignon case challenged the constitutionality of the federal bootleg statute, and in 2004, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. struck down the port banning the sale of bootleg recordings of live music, ruling that the law unfairly grants a seemingly perpetual copyright period to the original performances.[58][59] In 2007, Judge Baer's ruling was overruled, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the anti-bootlegging statute was within the power of Congress

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleg_recording

So it was not even illegal when I 1st started dubbing music now days with YouTube  online music  for free I lost most of my interest in it. Just because I dubbed music when i was teen dont mean anything . I bought all kinds of music after i got old enough to work and  some pirates today buys lots of music still and pay for online services .

 

People Were Stealing Music Long Before Millennials Ruined Everything with Internet Pirating

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/music-piracy-bootlegging

Quote

Music pirating has existed since the beginning of recorded music—but the last decade would rather have you blame yourself, your bedroom, and Napster. This is the history.

 

 

Back in my day we were  going to friends and stuff to  dub tapes  that our parents bought for us and we all shared with each other   also we recorded from the radio mixed tapes. Today kids extract music from Youtube  and download Flacs ..iTunes and MP3 or record  it from some stream but even if there was never no internet and they could stop it online  it would not stop it offline. Kids will be Kids.