I’m not paying a lot of attention to SXSW this year, but I’ve run across a few references to it. NPR has a good bit of coverage, which can be found here, along with their Austin 100 playlist. They used to make that available for download as a big file of MP3s, but this year, it’s just out there as a streaming playlist, on Spotify or Apple Music or a couple of other streaming services. I’m a little disappointed by that, but I guess that’s the way things are going lately. Back in 2005, you could download 750 MP3s from SXSW, via BitTorrent (legally).

Also, I think it was called “South by Southwest” back then, and SXSW was just an acronym, but I guess now it’s officially just SXSW? I’m getting too old to keep up with this stuff. Anyway, there’s some good music coming out of that. Today is the last day.

I’m still a holdout on this whole $10/month streaming music thing, but it’s getting harder to stick to my guns on that. Spotify has a new deal where you can get a free Hulu subscription with Spotify for $10/month, though it’s the ad-supported Hulu option, not the ad-free one. And honestly there’s enough stuff in my Netflix and Amazon Prime Video queues to keep me busy for years, so I don’t really need another streaming video option. But it’s tempting.

I’m seeing some interesting things, like this Austin 100 playlist, that are only being made available as Spotify and/or Apple Music playlists lately. It seems like the assumption is that everybody is subscribing to one of these services now.

My own tastes, right now, are leaning more towards stuff that can be found on Bandcamp though, and they’re still going with the old-fashioned “give us money and we give you MP3 files and/or a CD” model. (Though they also let you stream anything you buy from them. And, technically, they let you stream almost anything on their site, even if you don’t buy it.)

I do listen to Amazon Prime Music sometimes, and there’s some good stuff on there, but that’s part of the overall Prime subscription, which I’d probably pay for even without the music. So I guess I can still hold off on giving Spotify (or Apple Music or whatever) ten bucks a month for streaming music.