SxSW – Lost That Loving Feeling for Early Stage Entrepreneurs

Performing on private property without the permission of the property owner is not a "right", and is subject to many restrictions, most, if not all, have nothing to do with SXSW.

Try going to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and pulling off that stunt there - you'll get more than just an earful from management.

SXSW is a big event. Whether or not it makes sense for startups has a lot to do with the people who attend and how you plan to get their attention, more than whether the conference organizers care to cater to the less well-funded.

>Like any big corporation, SxSW has come to embody the very people and industry they once aimed to disrupt. They’ve made spontaneity illegal (literally) and lost that sense of passion and experimentation.

Holy wow, overreact much? Sorry that your stunt didn't go over well, but this hyperbole is really unnecessary. True, South By has become more corporate, but it's still an epicenter of entrepreneurship, startups, networking, and discovery.

Ipso facto... not so true-o

At an event as big as SxSW "crowd control & liability reasons" just don't cut it. You can sure as hell bet that everything is insured with layers of event and general liability policies and the law enforcement is trained to work with these kinds of crowds (as they are, for example, during Burning Man and Escape from Wonderland).

Controlling who associates themselves with their brand is an entirely different issue and should be treated separately. Here it results in (at least in my mind) a devaluation of the SxSW brand because this is the opposite of what I thought it was supposed to represent.

Also, venue fees? Really? In a Hilton Lobby?

Edit: Actually the above is a largely moot point. Hilton called the police, which I would think has nothing to do with SxSW

Austin is the self-proclaimed 'live music capital'. I lived there for 8 years, and, to my understanding, spontaneous performances anywhere will be shut down not matter what time of year it is, and especially if its on private property.

Really, its pretty reasonable. With 40,000 undergrad students flooding into the city every fall, you have to keep crazy kids from playing impromptu shows on the street... even more so during SXSW since those are the same kids that want to be 'discovered' by record labels...

... or was that last decade when that mattered?