Posted on 03/24/2009 2:17:30 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
Shirtless and sweaty on Friday night, singing garage-rock in Portuguese and English on the back patio of an East Austin bar, Guilherme Saldanha from the São Paulo band Garotas Suecas paused before the last song of a half-hour set and announced, “We’re playing, like, in, one hour so we’d better be going.”
It was one of about a dozen sets that Garotas Suecas... would perform during four days of the 23rd annual South by Southwest music festival here. From Wednesday through Saturday, more than 1,900 acts played official showcases while plenty of others sang from parking lots, rooftops, street corners and front yards...
During the frenzy of the festival, known as SXSW, the potential audience includes deal makers and gatekeepers across the music business, and a successful appearance, even if it’s in a small club, can ripple across old and new media. Radio stations set up live studio sessions with their choice of visiting bands; bloggers toil ceaselessly. To maximize their exposure many bands are thrown into the 21st-century version of a work ethic out of the vaudeville era: multiple sets a day and plenty of glad-handing in between. At this festival music is no job for a slacker...
Brand-name acts showed up to stoke their careers... (Metallica, Kanye West, Jane’s Addiction, Echo and the Bunnymen, Devo and Primal Scream)
Now that listeners have more choices and the Internet undermines mass-media clout, up-and-coming performers have less chance to gather a broad pop audience. Instead songwriters consolidate their niches...
...But most musicians here were less concerned with the interests of the music business than they were with reaching listeners... They saw their future not in stadium tours or rock-star indulgences, but in the pragmatic steps of setting up another tour or doing another studio session...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping
Speaking of Austin, I saw Bad Livers in concert Sunday night in SanFran. They are the bluegrass equivalent of speed metal.
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