You can torrent 8.42 GB of free music provided by SXSW right now

For a decade, the SXSW music festival has offered thousands of tracks from various artists free of DRM. While the method of releasing all of these songs has differed from year to year, SXSW opted to release freely available MP3 files for this year’s festival and left it to the community to consolidate them all into an easy-to-use torrent. This year’s content is currently available in two torrents with 1,291 files totaling 8.42 GB between them. 

Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of DRM-free tracks from participating artists. For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been in the hands of the public. In 2014 SXSW replaced the MP3 files with Soundcloud links, which complicated the archiving process. Luckily, this year all of the regular SXSW showcase MP3s are freely available again on the festival site for sampling purposes. In common with previous years, Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to upload all of the MP3s onto BitTorrent with proper ID3 tags. The 2015 release is out now and comes in two torrents containing 1,291 tracks. That’s 8.42 gigabytes of free music in total, which is a new record. “These torrents include tracks that can be previewed on the SXSW website for SXSW 2015. This year’s includes 1,291 files totaling 8.42GB, making it the largest to date,” Stolt notes. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their MP3 players without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2015 archives now total more than 55 gigabytes.