Description: South By Southwest is a Film, Interactive and Music Festival that rocks Austin for two weeks in Mid-March. After another amazing Sx (SouthBy) I thought about all of the events happening all over town and all of the interesting and unique people that invade our city. My conclusion is this: South By Southwest is the Best Conference or Festival Around.
It is both work and play. You can be productive, very, very productive, and yet party your ass off. The sciences and arts combine for two weeks of knowledge, networking, and sonic overload.
When talking about smart conferences, some may say TED is the best, and others may think of the Aspen Ideas, or a handful of other engaging places where intelligent people meet up to discuss new ways to improve technology and society. SxSW Interactive can fit into that category as well, as it brings all of the new, young, ambitious minds into town to discuss and promote what will eventually take over our world (twitter anyone?). The Interactive Conference has grown quickly over the past few years, from being a piggy back to the Film Conference, it now stands on its own as a great event.
But, that is not all. The Film side has long been a great avenue for unique and edgy films to premier and get notoriety. The Film Festival, while not on the same level as Sundance or Toronto, is definitely one of the better fests in the country. For ten days you can see hundreds of movies, some blockbusters, and some small DIY indie flicks, but all of them entertaining and unique.
And then there is the music. Of course we have ACL later in the summer, and other festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza, but for sheer number of bands in town, and amount of music, nothing comes even close to SxSW Music. Just to give you an idea of the amount of music going on, my local coffee-shop (which is on the outskirts of downtown and not in the "festival" area) had over 200 bands playing through the weekend. Of course there are tons of "Official" events, but in three years, I have yet to go to an Official Venue for music. There are just too many free shows and venues such as Fader Fort (free music, drinks, manicures, haircuts, etc.), Dickies Party, and oh, about a hundred other random bars, clubs, coffee shops and so on.
Okay, so you take a great innovative techie conference, then add to it a creative film festival showing tons of great movies, and, you know, the biggest and best music festival around. Nothing really comes close to this. If you consider yourself a creative person, or just like being around creative people, or just like kickass entertainment, then you MUST come to Sx. It rocks.
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