SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/81866
1998 SXSW Music Keynote Nick Lowe. Swenson. "Th e trade show was the biggest ever, taking over two exhibit halls for the fi rst time. My main mental image is fl at-screens in every direction." Adds Wilcox, "everywhere you turned there were hordes of dot-com Beets in Th e Austin Chronicle about one 1997 panel, "the consensus was that the hype is still a few steps ahead of the common man's hardware. Slow downloading is the predominant barrier, followed by poor sound quality and the fact that sitting at a desk with your face in a monitor isn't exactly a pleasant way to hear your favorite music." By 2000, of course, "the Tech Bubble was fully infl ated," says our registrations and applications came in by mail or fax," remembers CTO Scott Wilcox. "My day-to-day responsibilities consisted mostly of typing registrations into Filemaker one at a time." "As far as downloading music directly from websites," wrote Greg In 1996, SXSW had but a single Compuserve e-mail address. "All of registrations. But it was now a digital event. Panels chief, Andy Flynn had started SXSW's online music business newsletter, an early example of aggregation, in 1998. In 2000, Wilcox began using miniDV cameras to shoot bands and red carpet fi lm premieres, and he also posted fi lm trailers and MP3s on SXSW.com. "Many of the bands and fi lmmakers were initially concerned that they were giving their product away," says 14 SXSW ORLD / M ARCH F ILM- I A 201 1 employees running around talking in nonsensical lingo about their new companies. It had become increasingly apparent over the past 18 months that there was no real business model behind many of them, but the venture capital was fl owing so freely that they all had money to attend SXSW to market their brands." One prominent trade show hawker, yes, Napster, would go on to be played by Justin Timberlake in Th e Social Network. Easy come, easy go. In 2001, SXSW suff ered its fi rst-ever decline in Wilcox. Today, SXSW uses more than 80 volunteers and staff ers to fi lm, edit and publish content for the web, mobile and YouTube. 2000 also brought changes to SXSW's non-Austin events. Toronto's NXNE, while still part of the family, had become largely independent, while Portland's NXNW simply ended. Th is would prove to be fortui- tious, as the next edition had been scheduled for September 13, 2001. Swenson says that the inevitable cancellation "might have taken down SXSW," which got hammered by the post-9/11 economic climate anyway (along with the entire music business). But in the bigger picture, he notes, "our decision to stop trying new out-of-town events, and focus on the three in Austin, really marks the beginning of the serious, steady growth of SXSW from a regional event to an international phenomenon" — as well as a phenomonen where the two "other" festivals got equal billing. Swenson was downright prescient in 1999 when he told the Statesman's Riemenschneider, "[Film and Interactive] have always brought in enough money to pay their hard costs. We believe that even- tually they'll be truly profi table...and position us to remain vital in terms of whatever entertainment is likely to become in the next 20 years." ■ This is the third of fi ve excerpts from the forthcoming SXSW Scrapbook: People and Things That Went Before to be published in the coming issues of SXSWORLD. The book will be published by UT Press and available in March 2011. Do you have a SXSW memory to share? Or a photo from an important show or event at SXSW? Send it to scrapbook@sxsw.com JANA BIRCHUM