South by Southwest: Woodstock for The 21st Century
South by Southwest is a music, film, and tech conference that is held in Austin, Texas every year since 1987. Over the course of its life, the convention has grown and evolved in numerous ways. Today, the convention is ostensibly three separate and distinct conventions that run concurrently. They focus on many aspects of new media, filmmaking, and music production and performance.
South by Southwest, or SXSW, was started as a small music festival. Originally, the event was going to be organized by one of the individuals behind New York City’s New Music Seminar. They reached out to Roland Swenson and asked for his help building the event. Eventually, the event fell through but Swenson decided to plunge headfirst into organizing the event regardless. Two coworkers of Swenson’s, Louis Black and Nick Barbaro were brought in to lighten the load on Swenson. They quickly realized they needed someone who had real expertise in booking talent and music managerial skills so they enlisted the help of Louis Meyers. It was Black who named the festival as a play on the notorious Hitchcock film North By Northwest.
The very first SXSW was expected to draw 150 people to its humble venue. In fact, it drew in over 700 people. People flocked from all over the country in order to partake in the event. The principle organizers, minus Meyers who left in the early 1990’s, stayed involved in the festival all the way through 2010.
Over the course of its existence, SXSW has served as a bastion of innovation, technical progress, musical celebration, and innovative leaps forward. The fact that so many intelligent passionate people were in the same place for an extended period of time, lends itself to progressive thought and innovation. Many individuals have had great things happen to the at SXSW. John Mayer’s performance at the 2000 South X lead to him being signed by Aware Records, catapulting him to fame and fortune. The British singer of “Beautiful” fame, James Blunt was discovered at the event by Linda Perry. Soon after he was signed to Custard Records. The film genre of Mumblecore is credited to starting due to the support from South X.. Films like Kissing on the Mouth, Mutual Appreciation, and The Puffy Chair all found success at the festival.
South by Southwest has served as a venue for start-ups, filmmakers, musicians, and authors to showcase their works. This year’s 2016 had approximately 72,000 artists and registrants in attendance, more than 100 times greater than the first festival. Now people from all over the globe flock to this world-renowned festival. Over the three decades plus since its inception a whole lot has changed but the core desire is the same: to bring people together and help foster ideas. A pretty good reason indeed.