SXSW Offers Free 240 Song Download Sampler

"Music fans don't have to be in Austin, Texas, to hear hundreds of new songs from the South by Southwest music festival," reports Wired.com

For many years, SXSW, as it's known, has provided on its website a library of free MP3s of bands participating in the conference. This year, the festival is making it even easier to listen by providing a huge BitTorrent file (2.6 GB) of more than 750 songs. The songs can be downloaded for free using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing application.

"For added convenience, the music is integrated with a new application called SXSW4Pod from CitizenPod. Instead of carrying around the schedule of SXSW bands and venues as a dog-eared brochure, festival-goers can download the lineup electronically and transfer it to an iPod."

"At the festival, which starts next week, fans can search for shows by time, venue, genre or band name, and then listen to a full-quality MP3 of the band to see if they're any good..."

"We wouldn't have been able to do this without using BitTorrent, because this is such a huge file and it would have taxed our bandwidth resources beyond our capabilities," said David Rose, webmaster of the SXSW site."

"For the bands, providing a free MP3 of their music is optional. Of the more than 1,350 bands scheduled to play the festival, 758 offered an MP3. The songs can also be downloaded individually from the conference website."

Read the full Wired.com article here.

Download the SXSW file here.