Ariel Publicity

Industry Experts & Musicians Dish Out Their Best SXSW Tips

As a follow up to last week’s The SXSW Survival Guide, I’ve decided to take some of the best tips from some of the experts of today’s music industry and provide them for you here! I took the time to talk to some of the contributors from our 2009 Indie Maximum Exposure list to see what they had to say.

Over the next several days, I will be posting all-new tips that you can use to maximize your South by Southwest experience.

This advice is divided up into 3 sections

1. Before You Go
2. While You Are There
3. After You Get Home

There are not 100 here but they are some great gems…

BEFORE YOU GO

Read “How to Talk to Anyone” A Week Ahead
So, the week before the conference, read “How to Talk to Anyone” or any book about how to be a great listener. Then, use the conference as your testing ground for your new listening skills. Get extremely interested in those around you. Think like an investigative reporter. Ask follow-up questions about how they got into that. What they love and hate about it. Ask why they came to the conference. Talk about non-work-stuff, too!  Be very curious about their unique perspective. Learn from it.
- Derek Sivers

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Now that you know what to do to prepare before you get on the road, you need to know what to do while you’re there! Here’s what our experts have to say:

WHILE YOU ARE THERE

Go With The Flow
Don’t bother jotting down the bands you want to see because chances are, you will not make it to most of them. You’ll be on your way to see the band you “must see,” and you will absolutely run into someone you know on the street, then one thing leads to another, and you missed the show.
- Lou Plaia

Stay Portable
Unless your artist image is “musical Sherpa,” then you don’t want to be tied down to a huge backpack or bag full of crap. You’d be better off having a second-run CD batch made in thin, lightweight packaging OR have some download cards made. Nothing sucks more than hauling 40 pounds of round plastic with you. If it’s too late to make your CD’s in flat packaging (cardboard sleeves, paper envelopes, Tyvek, etc.), don’t lug around a bunch of jewel cases. You’ll be better off in the long run if you can just pick up and move to the next party, function, session, etc.
- Matthew Ebel

Make Free Time
Scheduling meetings is great, but you never know who you are going to run into on sixth street, so leave some holes in your schedule. Some of my best meetings at SXSW have been by chance.
- Rick Goetz

Try Not To Judge A Man By His Business Card
The music business is like that board game perfection. Every few months all the pieces pop up and people land in different positions and in different companies. Do your best to meet people of quality rather than just the people you think have something you need. You never know where people end up and having been nowhere important and somewhere important several different times in my career – trust me when I say I appreciate the people who gave me the time a day when I didn’t have a flashy business card or a lot going on.
- Rick Goetz

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