I am always on the lookout for ways to make things more efficient so that I can fit new things in my life, or maybe catch up on all the things I haven’t gotten to. Honestly sometimes it’s to give me more time to goof off, but so what.
So I have this habit going back five years or so, where I would find the giant torrent file that someone created of all of the songs by SXSW invited artists, musicians and bands scheduled to appear that particular year. If you don’t know what a torrent is think of it as a large digital file that you can download a little faster than just from one website. Anyway, imagine that you wanted a sample of music from people playing at SXSW in Austin, that’s what this is to me: a kind of digital radio program that would get you up to speed. Since I don’t go to SXSW, it took me there instead.
Except this compilation is sometimes 1100 or even 1700 songs in all kinds of styles, including some that I don’t particularly care for and mostly artists that you’ve never even heard of. But some of them you should have, and some of the songs are inventive, or cool or soon to be cult classics, or up-and-coming stars.
If you listen to music because you want to make it, if you listen to music while you’re writing and it sets the mood for you, or if you want to do the other thing I did with it, which is torture your family by methodically playing all of the songs over the next few months deciding which ones you’d like to keep and rating them on your iPod, that is definitely the way to go.
Just Google “SXSW 2018 torrent” and figure out how to torrent something if you don’t know how, and you will have more music than you care to listen to. And I mean that in all the ways you can mean that, and I apologize for some songs that you will hate, not all of which will overlap with the ones that I would hate, which is what is so amazing about the whole thing.
But this post is about efficiency. I actually don’t know if somebody made a giant music file pile this year, but I noticed last year that NPR was putting up a list of their favorite 100 songs, which means they already went through a multitude of artists and picked some amazing stuff and made it available in one download.
And here it is.
Stream or download 100 great songs by artists performing at SXSW 2018.
— Read on www.npr.org/2018/03/01/585356494/the-austin-100-a-2018-sxsw-mixtape
I haven’t had a chance to listen to them yet, but last year there were a lot more hits than misses. Plus, it had a few songs that weren’t in the giant torrent file that I also listened to, and didn’t have some songs from that pile that I really loved. But this time I’m going to stop at 100, and move on to the next addictive media on my list. If you find something really great in the giant pile free to share the details in a comment below.
—–David
P.S. Last year my daughter and I got a kick out of Tacocat, whose song “I Hate The Weekend” was particularly catchy, though we enjoyed it ironically and actually like the weekend. I do not know how the band really feels about the weekend, but that is the beauty of Art: the end-user can interpret it anyway they want and there’s not a lot you can do to stop that.
P.P.S. Update: I had to find out. 1276 files. I’m going to try not to download them too.
Also published on Medium.
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