I will post on the SXSW policy panel in which I participated in a following post. For now, I just wanted to convey a small hint of what is South by Southwest, and why every policymaker involved in copyright in Washington and every techie developing business models involving creative works in Silicon Valley has to come here at some point. This small downtown district of Austin, Texas (most of the key clubs are on one stretch of road, 6th Street) is host for four nights to more than 1,400 bands. There are "official" SXSW bands playing at night in "official" SXSW clubs every hour on the hour at night until 2 am. There are more bands playing at "private" parties that go on until 6 am or later. There are entrepreneurial bands who didn't get an invite to SXSW but are still here playing in clubs that aren't an official part of the festival. And there are the still more entrepreneurial artists playing on streetcorners, including a male/female duo playing plastic drums and a washboard, respectively.

What do all of these artists want? Do they just want acclaim, to be appreciated, the way someone who contributes to a piece of open-source software will be satisfiied merely by the contribution itself? Um, no. They want to be signed, they want to be paid. This is capitalism at its most raw.

And I love it.

God bless all of these ambitious artists, with fantastic names like The Beasts of Bourbon, Bowling for Soup, Daylights for the Birds, The Dirty Skirts, Dust for Blood, Fatal Flying Guilloteens, Hammers of Misfortune, Holy F*$k, Holy S#&t!, (I censored those two) I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, The Ladybug Transistor, Lesbians on Ecstacy, The Manhattan Love Suicides, Menwhopause, my!gay!husband!, Say Hi to Your Mom, This Moment in Black History, Tranwreck Riders, and Yuppie Pricks. Every single one of them is here competing in the ultimate market, the market for talent and skill, the market of you.

How many of these will end up as big as Gnarls Barkley or Justin Timberlake? Hard to say, but the odds are not many. But I'm reminded of what Rick Carnes of the Songwriter's Guild of America said during our panel. He asked how many in the audience were songwriters. Many raised their hands. Then he asked how many wrote songs because they couldn't do anything else? They couldn't work in a regular job and toil for the man? Most of the hands remained raised. It's possible the Lesbians on Ecstacy have desk jobs when not performing in Austin, but I suspect they feel far more comfortable on a stage. And we're all better off for it.