Fifth Annual SXSW BitTorrent Download Is Almost Legal

Thousands of bands and countless music freaks will descend on Austin, Texas next week for the annual SXSW music conference, representing some of the best and brightest contemporary music makers, from naive hopefuls to grizzled veterans. Even if you’re not making the trip, you can hear an astonishing selection of their music from the comfort […]

sxsw_logoThousands of bands and countless music freaks will descend on Austin, Texas next week for the annual SXSW music conference, representing some of the best and brightest contemporary music makers, from naive hopefuls to grizzled veterans. Even if you're not making the trip, you can hear an astonishing selection of their music from the comfort of your own headphones without paying a cent.

Bands and labels normally get nervous when people start slinging around their music on BitTorrent, but this time, they won't likely complain. Starting in 2005, the organizers of SXSW themselves posted massive zip files containing the music of hundreds of bands scheduled to play the festival, for people to trade on file sharing networks as a way of promoting their festival and the bands playing there.

When SXSW ceased that practice in 2008 in favor of posting songs individually, the crowd stepped in to continue the tradition of offering the whole shebang as a big torrent download. Greg Hewill built a torrent for that year and reposted the previous ones, after SXSW had taken them down. Ben Stolt took over in 2009 and also created this year's unofficial SXSW Torrents site, which includes links to all five annual editions.

BitTorrent — like e-mail or a baseball bat — is not an illegal technology. But all three can be used to infringe on other people's rights.

"For 2009, since no one had stepped up (and I was itching to start going through songs), a friend and I took over the task of finding and downloading all the songs to build the torrent," Stolt told Wired.com. "I took a different approach and made it use open resources -- Google to host the torrent file and large public trackers to handle the tracking -- so that it was not hampered by my own limited bandwidth and resources.... I [also] resurrected all the old torrents back to 2005, since they are no longer hosted anywhere else."

Stolt believes SXSW organizers are fine with what he's doing, and said they have yet to complain about this year's or last year's torrents: "We've justified creating the torrent because SXSW used to do it themselves, there has been one for six years now, and they've never said they don't approve, and all the songs are right there on the official site -- anyone can download them. That's where we got them, too. I've been pretty open about being behind these torrents. I could have stayed anonymous. If they had a problem with them, they could easily contact me."

An SXSW organizer reached by phone, who refused to identify herself, said SXSW does not have explicit permission from the bands to distribute their music as a torrent, so it can't officially condone the SXSW 2010 files making the rounds this week.

"We have an obligation to the bands," said the SXSW organizer. "That's definitely not something that we would want done, and we try to not do that by making them streaming-available on the site." She added that her boss would get back to us with an official response about what action, if any, will be taken. As of today, Stolt said he has not heard from SXSW about the torrents, which are out in the wild at this point, so even if they ask him to close his site, they'll be available on other torrent-tracker sites.

Stolt posted the first batch of MP3s on Feb. 15 and the second on Saturday (via Sandbox.fm). Even if you're not attending the festival, the files cover a wide cross-section of the new music being made these days, providing a quick and easy way to catch up on the latest sounds -- especially if, like so many of us, you're overly dependent on old music you've already ripped or downloaded.

The annual ritual of sifting through this haystack of SXSW music demonstrates that BitTorrent -- like e-mail or a baseball bat -- is not an illegal technology in and of itself, though any of the three can be used to infringe other people's rights. In this case, these SXSW torrents are technically infringement, but given their history and the promotional effects not just on the festival but on the bands themselves, we'd be surprised if charges were filed.

Besides, most bands are probably overjoyed to be included. Stolt even felt it necessary to make clear on his site that if they hadn't added their music to SXSW by March 6, there's no way for them to add it now.

If you're not familiar with BitTorrent, it may seem confusing at first, but it's actually quite simple. First, you'd install a BitTorrent client such as the cross-platform Vuze, then click on a ".torrent" link on a torrent-tracker website. In some cases, it's as simple as that. In others, you may need to configure the software to play nice with your router: Vuze includes an auto-configuration utility.

Home of the (Unofficial) SXSW Torrents

See Also: