Flashes of Panic

I alluded to this in my last post, but since there may be one or two people who read here but don’t read No Fancy Name and need a bit more explanation.

The South by Southwest music festival (which the hip people always type as “SXSW”) made available, this year, a massive collection of MP3s from artists playing at the festival. And when I say “massive,” I mean about 750-plus songs, which was a 20% increase in my library. It could take me a month or two just to absorb the collection, playing it in the background, rating and culling when something catches my notice (positively or negatively.)

It really brings home the scale of the festival. There are very few duplicate artists in the list, and though there are several I’ve heard of (maybe they played at the Horse, or in some cases, maybe they’re local around here) I only found one duplicate between the showcase and my own collection. Then I got to thinking about 750 bands… where do they put them all? How do they schedule them? Is there anyplace within ten miles of downtown Austin where you can’t hear live music?

The other fun thing about the showcase is the distribution method. The collection (a pair of zip archives, plus another folder of late additions) is being distributed via BitTorrent, which is the latest trendy way to share files. The festival “seeded” the torrent by providing the original files, but by now most people “downloading” the showcase aren’t actually getting it from the festival; they’re copying bits from all the other people who are downloading it, and they’re sharing the parts they’ve already downloaded with everyone else in this massive multi-directional file share. The festival just pushed a snowball down the hill; it’s rolling on its own now.

BitTorrent has been in wide use by early-adopters for a while now, because it’s a stellar way to distribute large files like Linux disk images. Lately, I’ve heard it’s being used to share digital recordings of TV shows with those who missed them, and there’s a booming market for concert bootlegs. Supposedly, BitTorrent traffic is now nearly a third of all internet traffic. So in addition to all the new music, this gave me an excuse to dust off my client. BitTorrent is still at that phase (which RSS/Atom/etc. are beginning to leave) where most sites offering a torrent feels like they need a little thumbnail explanation of what this is, and how you need to pick it up.

It took me about a day and a half to get the whole thing downloaded, mostly time I was away from the computer so BitTorrent could use the whole DSL line.

Now Playing: Waiting Under the Waves from SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artist by Kris Delmhorst