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The Austin 100

Every year in March, thousands of musicians from around the world converge on Texas' capital city for the SXSW Music Festival. It's a remarkable banquet of music discovery that spans many genres, most continents, dozens of clubs across Austin, hundreds of parties and nearly a full week. It's a lot to digest, even for festival veterans. (2019 will be my 23rd year at SXSW.)

The Austin 100 distills the experience down to a little more than six hours of music, highlighting a hundred handpicked highlights from among the thousands of acts playing SXSW 2019. A multi-genre playlist spanning virtually the entire world, it's painstakingly engineered to help you find music you love that you might never have heard otherwise.

To listen, you can stream songs and read a bit of information on each artist's page, or you can listen to a playlist on a number of streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music. These six-plus hours of music are only part of NPR Music's SXSW 2019 coverage: You'll find more recommendations, conversations, videos and dispatches from this year's festival, as well as the All Songs Considered SXSW preview and wrap-up. In the meantime, enjoy the music!


Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)