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SXSW: Interview with eMusic’s Yancey Strickler
Yancey Strickler, eMusic Senior Director of Editorial and Features, offered his take on South by Southwest via e-mail — who he wants to hear, why he keeps coming back and some advice for bands trying to promote themselves. eMusic is one of the world’s largest retailers of independent music.
Shows I am most excited about: My most anticipated show is definitely the High Places (editor’s note: the band is on eMusic). They are an incredible duo from Brooklyn. High Places plays this incredibly inventive mix of world music, hip-hop and dream-pop. This description is inadequate, but imagine the Cocteau Twins singing over M.I.A. beats. Really amazing. Do not miss them.
It will be interesting to see how Vampire Weekend is received. How will the mostly justified hype and unjustified backlash play out? It is a good live show — just intensely likeable — and they’re one Jack Johnson or Dave Matthews opening slot away from being the biggest college band going.
Santogold from Brooklyn, who is clearly ready for something big. She sometimes sounds like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, at other times M.I.A.
Cool Kids are totally fun, throwback hip-hop.
The Raveonettes — to a lot of peoples’ surprise — just released their best record yet, and watching them shimmer and howl live should be a real treat.
Austin favorites: I am such a tourist. My primary foray outside of Sixth Street is very, very predictable: the Salt Lick. It’s very worth it, obviously.
What keeps us coming back: What makes SXSW so important is a combination of the music you can so easily discover there and Austin itself. One of my favorite SXSW memories was stumbling across this absolutely insane Japanese metal trio behind a taco stand last year. They were amazing — Green Milk from the Planet Orange, they are called — and it just made the whole festival. Austin is the kind of place where that can happen.
Hopes for this year’s festival: One of eMusic’s goals at SXSW is discovering new artists for our eMusic Selects program. eMusic Selects is an outlet we created on eMusic.com for unsigned artists - we feature two artists a month - and we are hoping to find some amazing talent down there. We already have a nice healthy list of people to check out. You can check the site in April for what we found.
Advice for bands: If you are a young band right now, you have to work twice as hard at self-promotion. The tools are out there - both on the web and off - and it’s become up to you to build a loyal audience. Do it with compelling music, but don’t be afraid to let people know who you are as people. Even if not everyone likes your music, everyone likes a good story and it pays off to share yours.
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