Is It Time to Move On From SXSW?

With Public Radio stations mishandling the massive festival, is it also time for artists and bands to re-assess their return on investment from SXSW?

A couple of weeks ago, House Republicans stripped the Corporation for Public Broadcasting of their funding.

Instantly, my inbox had pleas from several pubstations asking for my help in restoring that funding. Would I sign a petition? Would I call my representative?

This week I have emails from some of those same stations talking up their SXSW coverage — they’ll be on the scene, broadcasting live from Austin.

So let me get this straight, stations: you’re crying poor about potential loss of government subsidies, but more than happy to pour cash to travel to a hip music party? Maybe not the best look.

The justification is that listeners back home will be hanging on your every word describing the scene; eating up your interviews, and tuning in to live performances.

In a word: Bullshit.

SXSW is an incredible party, but the only station that should seriously be covering the event is Austin’s KUT. Not just because they’re the hometown station, but they’re perhaps the only station that has the music journalism staff and skill set to do it right.

A couple of years ago, Philadelphia’s WXPN examined its ratings data for the week they broadcast live from the festival. The expectation, naturally, was that there was so much interest in SXSW that ratings would spike.

The opposite occurred. Ratings were down.

That could be a statistical aberration. Or it could be the fact that stations that broadcast live from the event are misreading audience interest in an industry party hundreds or even thousands of miles away (that they cannot attend.)

You know how much fun it is to listen to a jock tell you how awesome SXSW is and how awesome the party is, and how awesome the warm weather is, and how awesome that last band was? Not fun at all. It’s bad radio. It’s the worst kind of radio — the kind that simply ignores the audience.

SXSW has become such a massive, commercialized event that it’s essentially the equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show for music. The clutter is so great, one has to wonder if the artists and bands get anything out of it anymore.

Again, a hell of a schmooze-fest, but the truth is, it really only serves industry insiders. Radio personnel, who are industry insiders, lobby to broadcast from the event as justification for their junket.

But it’s a disconnect from their audience back home. If they really wanted info about what was happening as SXSW, they could get it from hundreds of different sources. For God’s sake, Chevrolet has a full-time blogger at the event to talk music and pimp the Chevy Cruze. (See AdAge article here)

Instead of pouring cash into the SXSW money machine, stations are much better off using those funds and man-hours to create something back home that they own, that they can monetize, and that their audiences can appreciate.