Mediaboss Marketing

NEW YORK Increasingly, the media zoo that is SXSW looks more like todays overlapping media world.

The annual South by Southwest Conference and Festival, which begins Friday, gathers thousands of creators, performers, media and industry members for 10 days onto the boozy downtown streets of Austin, Texas. Its really three festivals Interactive, Film and Music in one, but each bleeds into the other.

The annual buzz word at SXSW is always convergence. Just as the tech and entertainment worlds physically descend onto Austin, media forms, too, are diverging. Many of those technologies and companies that might be found at SXSW Interactive have greatly altered those at SXSW Film (video-on-demand, Netflix, Hulu) and at SXSW Music (Apple, Spotify, Pandora).

Its a place where the question is always whats next and one has the impression of meandering hordes traipsing the streets of Austin searching for answers to a confusing and ever-evolving media landscape. There will be hundreds of panel discussions, countless predictions and even man vs. machine competitions that pit algorithms against curators.

Its like stepping into a temporary world for one week where youre maybe two or three or five years in the future, says Amber Case, wholl be making her fourth trip to SXSW as a keynote speaker for Interactive. Shes a cyborg anthropologist who studies the relationship between humans and machines, and founded the location-sharing platform Geoloqi.com.

Each realm of SXSW will have its own superstars. None will be bigger than Bruce Springsteen, this years music keynote speaker. (NPR Music and SXSW.com will live stream the event.) Interactive, though, will have its own rock stars, including Napster co-founder Sean Parker (famously portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network).

Many others will be there, too, often promoting new projects, including Jay-Z, Willem Dafoe (The Hunter), Richard Linklater and Jack Black (Bernie), Jack White, Joss Whedon (The Cabin in the Woods), Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow (HBOs Girls), comedy podcast star Marc Maron, the Magnetic Fields and a few thousand more.

SXSW, effectively a trade show for industry and media members, has been around since 1987 and has historically been primarily a music event where labels showcase their acts and young bands seek their big break. Film and what was then called multimedia were added in 1994.

After some lean years supported financially by the music side of SXSW, the Interactive part of SXSW has in recent years swelled to become the largest aspect of the event.

Its not all that apparent what were doing different now, but knock on wood, says Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive. Theres lots of reasons for the growth, but the general reason that encapsulates it all is the growth of social media and social networks.

See the article here:
As digital, film and music worlds gather for SXSW media zoo, ‘convergence’ is annual buzz word