AUSTIN — Something was clearly amiss at this year’s South By Southwest music festival.
The Austin Convention Center — usually the bustling hub of the event — was practically a ghost town at noon on Friday. The center’s massive Flatstock concert poster art show had already packed up and left, a day earlier than usual. The annual free public daylong concerts on the banks of Lady Bird Lake had been condensed into one day.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, The Austin American-Statesman reported the four-day music-focused portion of SXSW will be eliminated in 2026, with music events folded into a shortened version of the overall festival.
Brian Hobbs, SXSW’s director of music festival programming, has since said the changes will expand the musical offerings, not scale them back. But it’s hard not to see this as the latest setback for an event that began in 1987 as a raucous music talent show.
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What’s behind the change? The popularity of SXSW’s celeb-centric film/TV portion may be partly to blame. The interactive part of SXSW also stole some of the thunder from the music side.
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The impending demolition of the Austin Convention Center may have also triggered the scaling back of SXSW from a nine-day event into a seven-day all-purpose festival next year. COVID-19 didn’t help matters, either, causing the closure of the fest in 2020 and 2021.
At its peak in the 2010s, SXSW showcased 2,000 bands, singers and rappers. Some were already famous (or at least established) acts trying to generate buzz. But most were little-known musicians hoping, against all odds, that a major record label bigwig would catch their 40-minute set and make them stars with a wave of the magic fountain pen.
This year, the number of acts performing had reportedly dropped to about 1,000. Still, there was no shortage of promising up-and-comers playing the clubs, restaurants and unofficial “day parties.” Highlights I saw this year included the accordion-fueled Irish rock band Cardinals, Indonesian instrumental funk group ALI, Austin’s one-man-band Mobley and Texas alt-country acts the Droptines and Joelton Mayfield.
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Yet the glory days of SXSW music are clearly in the rearview mirror. No need for music industry types to fly to Austin to discover new bands when the next big thing is blowing up on TikTok this very minute.
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For years, SXSW music has also been upstaged by Austin City Limits Music Festival, that massive assemblage of stars and new bands that draws a half million people to Zilker Park over two weekends each October.
For all those reasons, the decline of SXSW music was inevitable. But let’s hope it’ll continue to stick around in its new form. For those of us who’ve made the March pilgrimage for decades, it’s hard to imagine “the live music capital of the world” without it.