There are still many very good reasons to attend SXSW and there are even more unexplored ways to maximize your impact at the conference. The fact that the conference is so close to Houston makes it worth your while to attend even without a badge or wristband. Many industry professionals are in Austin during the week of music and the setting provides a good opportunity to contact and meet them to talk about your career. Label, booking and promotional companies also attend and fruitful research can be accomplished by sitting down with them for meetings. Additionally, with the rise of non-SXSW-sanctioned parties running virtually around the clock, the need to play a SXSW showcase is significantly less important than it was several years ago.

In personal communication with bands over the past couple years I’ve talked about how important it is to take control of your career and do game changing things to get noticed and build your audience. As a band working for itself, SXSW is the perfect staging grounds for this philosophy and the best way to accomplish this is to cut through the noise.

Don’ts:

• Don’t play 9 shows in 4 days; those last shows are going to be low on energy and probably not represent your band in the way you wish to portray yourselves.
• Don’t try and play the hottest party at SXSW; you probably don’t know what it is and if you did you’d already have representation working for you.
• Don’t expect to be discovered at SXSW and have everything handed to you from now on

Do’s:

• Look at what everyone else is doing and take a right turn from that
• Do play (at least) one show that will have the desired impact to get you noticed by any potential fans, not just that talent scout: a guerrilla show in the middle of the street, on the back of a flatbed truck while driving around, play your music blasting from a boombox while walking down the street, hang shirts of your band just out of reach on telephone poles near the convention
• Do your research beforehand to target the people you want to work with, write them beforehand, and get a committment to meet with them to talk
• Do attend Bandcampus: SXSW PREP at Caroline Collective on February 28th from 2-4pm to make plans to attack SXSW and get your digital and physical toolbox in order

That last part is key. This Sunday at Caroline Collective we will be holding the latest installment of Bandcampus, entitled SXSW PREP. Similar to last year, this will be a workshop pairing volunteers with musical artists working to get prepared for SXSW with the following goals:

1. Prepare press materials and basic online presence items for bands interested in attending SXSW.
Any band playing in Austin during SXSW needs to be prepared to promote themselves given the chance. Playing a show is just the start of that promotion. Artists need a press kit, songs hosted online, video posted online, booking and contact information somewhere as well as physical cds to sell to interested parties or to give to record labels or booking agents. Many bands are unprepared for this situation and are lacking many of these items. By providing musicians with creative experts bands can receive focused attention to generate or upload these items to a location on the internet that raises the artists’ visibility.

2. Announce the bands that will be playing at Houston@SXSW, a Houston focused party showcasing Houston musicians, filmmakers and technologists.
This year we will be holding the second Houston@SXSW party. Last year’s party, held at Gruv, sponsored by Kirtsy, Werkadoo, Schipul, AYNBrand, and Caroline Collective , was a locally focused party showcasing Houston talent in three areas: technology, film and music. The following artists showcased: Dave Wrangler, Western Civilization, Wayside Drive, Ben Wesley, Espantapajaros, Golden Cities, Liquid Kitchen, Tha Fucking Transmissions, American Sharks, Something Fierce, and Fat Tony / B L A C K I E.

This year’s party will again focus on the contributions of Houston’s creative professionals. Startups will present, films will be shown and musical artists will showcase. This year’s party will be held at Hudson’s (301 W. 5th), Monday, March 15th from 5pm-2am. Last year’s music was curated by myself selected from the bands who attended Bandcampus: SXSW PREP. This year’s showcasing bands will be selected by the community. That means you. And your community.

Pay attention because we are going to do this very quickly. Nominations are open as of now and will close on Thursday, February 25th at noon. If you are in a band, know a band or like a band, DO THIS NOW: nominate them in the comment section below.

Starting Thursday at noon, voting will open for all bands who were nominated. Voting details, site and rules will be given on Wednesday. Voting will close on Sunday, February 28th at noon. Bands who are selected to play the party will be announced at Sunday’s Bandcampus: SXSW PREP.

Sunday’s Bandcampus: SXSW PREP is for 1) Houston musicians attending SXSW as official selections, 2) Houston musicians interested in playing at the  Houston focused day party, 3) Bands looking to get their physical/online toolbox and online presence set up or checked by industry professionals, and 4) industry professionals looking to donate a couple hours to help bands generate/solidify these materials.

We need skilled graphic designers, web developers, copywriters, PR reps or any other creative professional which would be able to donate time and services for a couple hours to help bands prepare their online presence and press materials for SXSW.

WHAT: Bandcamp: SXSW PREP
WHEN: February 28th, 2-4pm
WHERE: Caroline Collective, 4820 Caroline Houston, TX
WHY: Prepare for SXSW, find out who’s playing Houston@SXSW; a free showcase of Houston creative professionals

Individual
Bioengineering is at its essence a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving for biological issues. Those basic tenets have been applied as an individual in both my professional and creative life attempting at a well-rounded academic and cultural education. While at Rice University studying bioengineering for bone defect repair, aspects of architecture, clinical plastic surgery and industrial design were combined with more standard bioengineering aspects of mechanical engineering, materials research and imaging modalities. The incorporation of these fields resulted in novel designs and solutions supported by engaging and dynamic presentations and graphic design telling a story easy to understand for the lay person. Continued discussion with the architecture school resulted in students and professors incorporating the ideals of bioengineering into their architecture projects, including concepts of scaffold ingrowth, duality/singularity between host and body and symbiotic relationships between construct and program interaction. As an instructor, classes were run with equal parts teaching and learning, instructing the students on CAD methods and then employing the students to teach others to accomplish the tasks. Outside of graduate school, I applied this multidisciplinary approach to producing live events incorporating art, music, and film accessible to lovers of any art medium.

Caroline Collective
This multi-disciplinary education and approach to problem solving has been applied at Caroline Collective, founded in June 2008 with Ned Dodington. Taking the belief that being well rounded as an individual can be a platform for discussion and interaction with other similar like-minded people, Caroline Collective’s goal is to positively impact the cultural landscape of Houston. Our programming develops community-based education models and creates opportunities for individuals and groups to be more successful incorporating seemingly disparate disciplines of technology, music, film, arts and non-profits. We’ve demonstrated that each community has unique challenges but those challenges can be met with similar methods: listening to the needs of the members, incorporating equal parts teaching/learning and arriving at a solution incorporating all of the facets of the problem. Since October we have been running a monthly series called Bandcamp that is a community-focused teaching program to educate musicians on the path to success in their career. A similar community focused meeting, Artcamp, was held last month. In developing sustainable methods to address the art community’s challenges we collectively arrived at the decision to create a Houston Arts Wiki and to hold a day long Houston-wide art fair to introduce all of the resources and arts groups in Houston. We have recently launched a bi-weekly series of business classes with a partner startup, Werkadoo, that teaches independents in any discipline the skills they need to manage a successful independent career. Several companies are forming underneath the umbrella of Caroline Collective pooled from the complementary talents of the members and community groups that inhabit the space.

Community
This transparent and multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving on a community level is akin to the Long Tail effect online. People with niche interests meet to discuss commonalities and find that challenges and interests are parallel rather than perpendicular. Coworking is the physical manifestation of that and Caroline Collective one of many staging points for that interaction in Houston. In Houston you can witness technology focused individuals attending arts events and arts focused individuals attending technology focused events. Communities are experiencing greater engagement, richer relationships and more accessible resources, all due to the framework of a multi-disciplinary approach to solving collective problems. Opera in the Heights is exploring incorporating technology into its performances and digital archiving. Two new coworking spaces have opened based on Caroline Collective’s model, one in the Village focusing on green companies and one in Katy opened by the Houston Technology Center; another is slated to open in the Woodlands. The passive belief that all groups can contribute to and provide solutions to individuals’ problems and the active incorporation of those ideals has resulted in greater collaboration among community groups and greater insight to addressing community and societal challenges.