Meet The Guy Who Reviewed All 763 Songs in the SXSW Torrent File

As hangovers acquired at South by Southwest finally fade, festival-goers have a lot to look back on from the nine-day music, film, and tech extravaganza. It’s not possible to see every band that plays, but you can always listen to their MP3s. Paul Ford reviewed every single song in the unofficial festival sampler put together […]

N698990986_2463
As hangovers acquired at South by Southwest finally fade, festival-goers have a lot to look back on from the nine-day music, film, and tech extravaganza. It's not possible to see every band that plays, but you can always listen to their MP3s.

Paul Ford reviewed every single song in the unofficial festival sampler put together by Greg Weill and distributed by thousands via BitTorrent. I wish I'd thought to interview him, but the Houstoned Rocks blog beat me to it.

Excerpt:

PF: Basically I was asked to review an MP3 or twoand I said I had this big idea. The truth is, the A's – I did it inalphabetical order – and the A's were pretty bad, and I was about readyto kill myself. And then I started to find one or two songs whichcompletely redeemed everything, and it was like, all right, it’s worthit, like you with Monotonix. You find something like that and yourealize it’s a worthy endeavor.

HR: Exactly. What was your process with this thing – like eight hours a day for six days?

PF: I'd be working, take a little break, listen toa couple songs, and then write them directly into iTunes in the commentfield. And there were a couple of days where I stayed late. I'd keepplowing through it, I could see how many I had left. And there were anumber of nights where I stayed until three or four in the morning, andthen I would take it home, and there were two, two-and-half weekendscompletely given over to it. So altogether it was 48 hours spread overa couple of weeks, and as long as you kept going at it steadily itwasn’t that bad. And not that it was ever suffering – I was listening to music.

**

(Houstoned Rocks; Photo: Facebook)

See Also: