This week, more than 2,000 bands will perform live as part of the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas — and each will hope to stand out somehow. It’s one thing to play SXSW, but another to generate excitement.
For the NPR Music team, attending SXSW means sifting and winnowing through hundreds upon hundreds of songs for weeks in advance, in an effort to better anticipate the festival’s highlights. Each year, writer and editor Stephen Thompson assembles a mix called The Austin 100 — a 100-song playlist highlighting new discoveries from SXSW — and in 2012 that meant listening to more than 1,300 songs.
In an interview for weekends on All Things Considered, NPR’s Guy Raz asked Thompson to distill that 1,300-song bundle down to just four discoveries — songs by artists he’d never heard before the process began.
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