SxSW Preview Listening Finished
2010 02 23 Tue I finally finished previewing all the 646 mp3's of the bands coming to SxSW 2010!
My list of picks in PDF format.
The top of the crop for this year:
- Akina Adderley & The Vintage Playboys ( I have seen them a few times before, and they are great.)
- Cosmo Jarvis
- David Fonseca
- Delhi 2 Dublin (I saw them for the first time last year, and they were awesome!)
- Meiko
- Orchid and Hound
- Ozomatli (They may be too big to see, but I like them.)
- T Bird and the Breaks
I have given the following ratings:
- 20
- 173
- 351
- 94
- 8
I am now ready to take the next step of my SxSW planning, finding out when each band plays.
I like to plan my music schedule to have at least 3 bands in every one hour slot from 7pm to 1am from Wednesday to Saturday. This allows for backups when a concert goes bad, a venue is way behind schedule, or I am not in the right area of town because I got distracted by another band I heard.
I also give lower scheduling priority to:
- local bands, I can see them any time during the year.
- bands I have already seen, they are good, but I need to give others a chance.
At 3 bands per slot by 7 slots per night by 4 nights, I have a total of 84 bands to schedule for the music nights! The thing to remember is that bands are playing all day all over town. So, if I have conflicts at night, I can usually fit them in during the day at a party someplace else!
I begin by going to the SxSW site, under A-Z music Schedule and clicking on all the bands I have picked and adding them to my schedule at my.sxsw.com. This gives me a good idea about what my music schedule looks like.
Next, I will begin to look at the day parties and see when I may also find some of these bands playing. I will also look at some of the other scheduling programs that are available to see if they can do a better job than the SxSW site. I will then start to to firm up the actual schedule order.
Reader Comments (2)
Wow, that's a LOT of bands. But I like your criteria, because I was starting to think "OMG, I am totally passing up all these possibly amazing local bands!" but you're right: they're always gonna be here, they LIVE here, so you can see them anytime. See the big guys you've never seen before.
Laura, thank you for commenting. I hope you are planning your SxSW fun as well. Please report back any suggestions that you have that will make the process easier.