Attend SXSW virtually

Every spring, the SXSW music festival invades Austin Texas.  In the early days, it was purely a musical affair, but since then has also grown to include both film and interactive festivals that run more or less concurrently.  Twitter, for example, launched at SXSE interactive in 2007.

As part of it’s musical side, artists both new and established have made MP3s available free to download from the SXSE website. In more recent years those files have been compiled by the public into a huge repository of RIAA safe torrent files.

This year, the repository is broken into two files, which add up to over 1000 free tracks, clocking in at over 5 gigabytes of data.  You can find the totally legitimate torrents, including to previous years, in the links below…

In 2008 it was Greg Hewgill who took the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and for the 2009 and 2010 editions Ben Stolt has done the same. Torrents of the previous editions have been a huge success and were downloaded more than 100,000 times. [via TorrentFreak]

If you can’t make it to SXSW, at least you can create your own virtual festival.