Fifteen

Austin’s South by Southwest music conference and festival is the ultimate music fan experience, with hundreds of bands performing over five days in every corner of the city, but it isn’t marketed to fans. For the festival, for the labels, and for the bands, the fans are simply not the focus. Why, at the Mecca of indie rock, is a captive audience of trend-setting hipsters met with near indifference by the conference and its participants?

“There’s value in those early adopters,” says Jeffrey Remedios, President of Toronto independent label Arts & Crafts, talking about the hard-core indie music fans that SXSW attracts, “but we haven’t thought about the festival that way.”

On Remedios’s first trip to SXSW, five years ago, he took Broken Social Scene, A&C’s flagship. The band arrived in Austin as virtual unknowns. They left with American and European partners – the seeds of a promotion and distribution network that would not only spur Broken Social Scene’s success, but that Remedios would tap over and over to launch A&C bands in subsequent years.

That’s how good SXSW can be to bands on the rise. But Remedios tells another story that is more sobering, and more typical. Three years ago, Stars, which had recently released the album, Set Yourself On Fire, that set themselves on fire, were to play the 1 AM show in a showcase that ran long. They ended up having to rush through a cursory sound check, and they played just a few songs, and not at their best. The experience was so ragged that A&C decided to host its own showcase at the next year’s festival.

Despite the brutal format, the chance to strengthen networks and expand into new markets is unparalleled. “It can be a very grueling festival,” says Remedios. “You get none of the things a band usually swaths themselves in to put on a good show. And you play for potentially the most important people you’re ever going to play for. You could tour the world and try to play for the three most important people in each city, or you can play for them all in one place.”

Creative industries are businesses in disguise. Indie rock, in particular, thrives on the musicians’ perceived indifference to whether or not many people have heard of them, and the listener’s pride in the fact that few have. SXSW is a perfect illustration of that ethos of independent music. Its powerful draw for dedicated fans is rooted in its pre-promotional raison d’etre, offering a peek behind the curtain and a few diamonds in the rough for intrepid explorers of un-vetted, un-filtered bands. The absence of a conscious marketing effort directed at festival attendees counter-intuitively strengthens the SXSW brand and that of those associated with it, by reassuring indie fans that they are choosing – they aren’t being chosen-for.

The festival is nothing if not a marketplace, serving a fundamentally promotional, commercial purpose.  But the fans are given the chance to look past that.  The premier independent music conference is an illuminating contradiction: an enduring symbiosis between the people doing business there and the customers being ignored there.