After spending five consecutive days at SXSW, your body starts to feel the effects of ingesting little other than tortilla-encased foodstuffs and Shiner Bock. Still, we powered through the body’s natural urge to shut down and made our way last night to one of downtown Austin’s premiere venues, The Belmont, for The Warner Sound’s downright phenomenal showcase featuring Frightened Rabbit, The Joy Formidable, Alt-J, and headliners The Flaming Lips. Read more…
With the music portion of the 2013 South By Southwest Festival well underway, now’s the time where festival attendees have to make difficult decisions about which of the over 5,000 acts in town they’re going to see. Fortunately for your friendly VH1 Tuner team, our decision about what to do last night was a no-brainer. We spent the night at the W Hotel in Downtown Austin for VH1′s “Hello Austin!” party, which featured performances from Youngblood Hawke, St. Lucia and Mia Moretti & The Dolls.
After a couple of days in which buzzword-spouting, app-shilling technology geeks dominated the streets of Austin, things were restored to their natural order yesterday when the music portion of the 2013 South By Southwest Music Festival kicked off in glorious fashion. We partnered up with our friends over at MTV and CMT for the Live In Austin Showcase, which featured knockout performances from current You Oughta Know artist Youngblood Hawke, bluesy banjo aficionado Elle King, super buzzy indie rockers Guards, and the legendary Jim James.
From L To R: Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, John Perry Barlow, Alex Winter and moderator Eugene Hernandez.
VH1′s latest Rock Doc, Downloaded, made its world premiere at the South By Southwest Music Festival on Sunday night. The film tells the story of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the two teenage hacker wunderkinds who brought the music industry to its knees when they founded Napster in the late 1990s. Earlier today, director Alex Winter joined Fanning, Parker and internet activist/Grateful Dead collaborator John Perry Barlow for a lively panel discussion about the disruptive effect this product had on the world.
We’ve collected the session’s most provocative quotes for you below. Read more…
Tonight at the South By Southwest Music Festival, the MTV/VH1/CMT Present: Live in Austin event is set to go down. The lineup for this special showcase is incredibly diverse, and will feature what promises to be a stunning headline performance by Jim James of My Morning Jacket fame. Read more…
When you see Downloaded, the VH1 Rock Doc that made its world premiere at the 2013 SXSW Festival last night, director Alex Winter presents some clear lines of demarcation between who he views as the heroes and villains of the story. Shawn Fanning, co-founder of Napster and the “face” of the company, is presented as a sympathetic figure, and the frightened “old world” mentality is personified by Metallica‘s drummer Lars Ulrich, who famously led the charge against the file-sharing service. We caught up with Shawn Fanning last night and asked him if, after all these years, he still had beef with Lars.
The world premiere of Downloaded, the latest entry in the Emmy award winning VH1 Rock Docs canon, went down at Austin’s Paramount Theater last night as part of the 2013 SXSW Festival. We were there on the red carpet, where we caught up with the film’s primary subjects, Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, and asked them each about the single biggest lesson they learned during this equally exciting and chaotic time.
Youngblood Hawke is a five-person, indie pop act that hails from the Los Angeles area hipster enclave of Silverlake. The group is also VH1′s featured You Oughta Know artist for the month of March, and we got to know them quite well over a course of a day they recently spent with us here in New York City.
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One of the things that you notice when you go to see Delta Rae perform live in concert is the band’s remarkable rapport. There’s nary a trace of rockstar ego or “me first” energy emanating from the stage during their shows; instead, the band gracefully alternates between four primary vocalists —siblings Ian, Eric and Brittany Holljes, as well as Elizabeth Hopkins— in a manner that’s exquisitely respectful to each other, and also intriguing to the audiences that see them. Read more…
We’re already firmly on the record with our desire to leave “Call Me Maybe” in 2012 where it belongs, but we’ll readily admit that there’s a part of us that will never be able resist the lure of Carly Rae Jepsen‘s disco strings. That arrangement is so catchy and inspiring that it can even turn the material of an angst-ridden sourpuss like Trent Reznor into something that makes you think of nothing but puppies and rainbows.
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VH1 Presents Mixtape Festival: Train, NKOTB, TLC, The Script + more! Tickets on sale now at MixtapeFestival.com!
