Chronicle Interviews SXSW’s Brent Grulke

Here’s an eye opening interview with SXSW’s Brent Grulke. A highlight, and my thoughts….

TCB: What are some of the factors behind holding (the release of band names)?

BG: The largest thing is we’re not trying to promote to consumers at all, and we want to be able to put out an accurate list. Once we put any kind of list out, we get all kinds of demand for it, people trying to figure out, “Oh, I need to get there; I need to get to this venue.” We also get artists saying, “Oh my God, how can you have us competing with this, competing with that?”

Instead of releasing acts piecemeal, it makes more sense to get as good a sense as we can of all the acts we want to invite and put together a schedule that makes the most sense, we believe, for the largest number of people attending. The thinking was that it didn’t do us any great favors having this information available earlier, because it creates this huge, huge, huge consumer buzz, and then we’ll get so many phone calls of people saying, “Can I get tickets to the Stooges?” These things take up a tremendous amount of our energy and resources.

First off, I have to imagine that “this is an industry event, not a consumer event” isn’t going to make the people of Austin happy.

Second, here’s a roll playing scenario, follow along with me….

I am a small, mostly unknown band and somehow by the grace of the gods I have been accepted to play SXSW. I have no industry connections, no “people” working my record, just my good music and live show.

If the release of the SXSW list does not happen until February 14ish, like the interview suggests, the window of opportunity for all the journalists, booking agents, publicists, industry people to stumble upon my name on the SXSW list has been shrunk by two whole months. Instead they’ll gravitate to the larger, known bands like the Stooges.

So if I’m that band, i start to wonder, is it really worth it for me to even play SXSW?

Just something to think about. I love SXSW so much, but this is just weird..

Read the interview and react in the comment section.