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Confirmed: SXSW Interactive paid registration surpasses Music
South by Southwest Interactive is over, but the post-festival analysis has just begun. Foremost on the minds of many who attended and who plan to return this year may be this question: is the festival growing too much too quickly?
Hugh Forrest, director of the festival, confirmed in a phone interview Wednesday figures we’d been hearing about attendance at Interactive. For the first time ever, the Interactive part of the festival has surpassed attendance of SXSW Music. Last year’s official tally of paid registration for Interactive (that is, everyone who had an Interactive badge or a Gold or Platinum badge that gave them access to the fest) was 10,741. Though Forrest says the fest doesn’t have an official head-count yet, the 40 percent increase we had previously reported will apparently stand. But that 40 percent is just for the Interactive portion of the 10,741, not the total number of Gold, Platinum and comped badges for the fest.
Make sense?
So, what sounded initially like an attendance figure that could have been as high as 15,037 will actually be closer to 12,000-13,000 for Interactive 2010, Forrest said.
“The growth rate is certainly a cause for concern,” Forrest said, “we’re gonna need to change things up significantly next year to even accommodate a growth rate that’s half that or less than that. These are significant challenges, but these are good challenges to have.”
Forrest said that he also believes that he’s been doing his job long enough to know this is cyclical; after years of swelling attendance during the late 90s, the festival contracted during the lean years after the dot-com bust. “Our cycle will be over soon enough and something else will grow,” he said
Organizers of the fest had estimated that the Film Festival was also growing this year, at a rate of about 25 percent over 2009. The music fest is expected to remain flat, but Forrest says the registration count for that part of the fest doesn’t include the many bands in town who don’t actually register with the festival. Including those non-registered out-of-towners, SXSW Music is still a bigger draw, Forrest said.
Last year, the Music fest had about 11,687 attendees or 13,165 including band registrations, according to the festival Web site.
The festival was blessed with four days of good weather before a downpour on Monday that crowded up some of the party venues with rooftops and kept people from far-flung panels in places like the Radisson Austin. Some panels and keynotes had long lines, but overall, Forrest said, “The response I’ve gotten so far has been very positive.”
However, “I’ve been through enough that often it takes a week or so to uncover the bigger problems that you didn’t know about,” he said.
Among the most popular topics at the festival were location-based services like Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla, user and app-interface design for emerging devices like Apple’s iPad and social networking for business, which attracted a large crowd at the Hilton.
“We may have underestimated how crowded that would be. Traditional businesses are trying to figure out how to leverage this power of social networking,” Forrest said.
Forrest responded to a string of blog posts and Tweets, many of them from non-attendees, criticizing the fest for being one big booze-and-party event.
“There’s a lot of fun things to do at night and during the day and Austin’s a fun place. As the event has grown over the last few years, one of the reason it’s grown is people realize they can get real business done here. I hope that that message isn’t completely lost in all the Tweets about parties.”
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By Jacob
March 19, 2010 9:07 AM | Link to this
I see the SXSW Interactive festival growing even more. People that attend this conference want to learn cool things, have interesting conversations, and party at night. It's not a purely business conference which is taken care of by other events like Web 2.0. All the tech reporters rave about it.
Furthermore the web is just beginning. The next 5-10 years will be very interesting time. Web apps, 100mb average speeds, cloud computing, HTML5, on demand entertainment.... I only see a boom if people don't over-sell the technology like they did in the late 90's.
By Omar Gallaga
March 18, 2010 3:32 PM | Link to this
Good point. I fixed the headline.
By carri
March 18, 2010 2:20 PM | Link to this
does that title make sense? should it say, "SXSW interactive surpasses music..."?