This year, we're not just posting reviews ? there are loads of new interactive gadgets and pages for you to play with
It's often said that festivals are a great chance to see dozens of bands in just a few days. Austin's SXSW festival is a bit different ? wander down past the bars on 6th Street and you'd be hard pushed not to catch dozens of bands in just 15 minutes. And this is all before the music part of the festival has even started (that kicks off on Wednesday, after tech and film).
All this week, the Guardian will be covering the best sounds of SXSW live from Texas. On the hunt for new, innovative ways to cover events like this, we've got a big team at SXSW this year. That team includes lowly music writers like myself but also tech journos and brainiac developers. What this means is we won't simply be writing reviews and running them on the Guardian website. In fact, our coverage will take a myriad of different forms. We'll be posting things to our personal Tumblr pages and Twitter accounts (follow @timjonze, @rosieswash and @paulmac for music stuff) as well as contributing more traditional print articles to the Austin Chronicle. The best bits of all this content will surface on guardian.co.uk ? but that's not all. Our recent SXSW hack day resulted in a whole load of exciting new interactive gadgets and pages for you to play with. For example, all the content posted onto Tumblr ? pictures, text, video pieces ? will all appear on this funky grid.
Elsewhere, there's a live buzz graph that measures the hype surrounding SXSW bands from social media and plots them on a chart (Ellie Goulding currently in the top spot). Head to our SXSW artist pages and you can listen to Soundcloud clips, read biogs and watch YouTube videos of most of the artists playing.
So that's how we will cover things but what are we planning on covering? Well, it might be easier to explain what we won't be covering, as already the place is swarming with rumours and talking points.
Will we be able to catch the free Strokes gig that's happening at Lady Bird Lake?
Will Odd Future live up to the hype?
And what can we expect from Kanye West's last-minute appearance?
This brave-new-world music coverage will kick off on Wednesday when bands arrive in town (at the moment the pavements are being pounded by bespectacled techies carrying Apple devices ? the hairstyles are likely to become crazier and the jeans tighter as the week develops ? but we'll still post the odd musical thing, such as a review of a panel I went to that offered legal tips for music bloggers.
So stay tuned and, provided we don't all fall at the first hurdle (hey, the bourbon is good here), there'll be some interesting SXSW coverage here.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/musicblog/2011/mar/14/sxsw-2011-guardian-coverage
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