ShellyBlog:

Each year’s SXSW conference turns my hometown into a giant carnival of music, food, and strangers from strange lands.

My contribution to SXSW coverage is a listing of free music downloads and samplers, featuring bands who will be in or near Austin next week.

A lot of techies may not realize that while the first five days of SXSW is a tech conference, there’s a huge live music component too. Even better, a lot of these undiscovered bands make their music available for free online. Shelly Brisbin has collated some of the links to these gigabytes of MP3s.