10 years at SXSW. Technically 2020 shut down and 2021 was online, but 10 years I’ve been enjoying a city filled with live music more dense, diverse, and good than anywhere in the world.
This was the first time I went to weekend one, which is the main attraction for the conference. It was informative. I got to see Ben Stiller talk Severance, the best show in the past 10 years, and something dear to my professional heart, Paramount CTO Phil Wiser talk about using LLMs with movie recommendations.
2025 was still all about the music showcase. For six years I’ve gone through every musician playing SXSW (usually around 1,000) and filtered it down to a manageable amount (usually around 5-10%) for a playlist to guide my schedule.