The infamous South by Southwest Music Festival has come to a junction. It seems for a while now, the festival has been caught between its music-discovery roots and its massive artist-name-drawing success. It is no stranger to criticism from its struggles after the pandemic to rising costs to lackluster lineups.
However, new leadership of the 2026 festival, Brian Hobbs, vice president of music, and Dev Sherlock, director of SXSW Music Festival, aren’t just acknowledging the headlines claiming that music’s dead at South by Southwest, they are using it as fuel to fire the rebuilding of the festival’s core, not just for this year, but are setting themselves up “for a wild trajectory over the next five years.”
“This year is proving to everybody who believed the false headlines of like, music’s dead at South by Southwest this past year,” said Hobbs. “You will not be able to see any reporting like that this year because the programming is just undeniable and why would these elite level artists that we have this year, why would they be coming to something that’s dead? It’s going nowhere but up.”
It is a year of ripping everything up and starting again. All the rules went out the window and the team rethought everything, every approach. There were a lot of new ideas put into play and questions around whether they are going to work and how they are going to make them work.
“Whenever you’re dealing with artists, there are a lot of particularities that you have to navigate and negotiate, and we do those every year,” said Sherlock. “I’m currently working on a project that is going to be a little bit of a surprise appearance by Ed O’Brien from Radiohead in one of our churches, and there’s been a lot of sort of detail and stuff around that that’s been take up a bit of time, but then when you actually get to sit there and you look at everyone in the room having this incredible experiences, you’re like, okay, that was worth it.”
The strategy for 2026 comes from their own experiences as attendees, before joining the organization. Sherlock sees the core value of the festival as moments of serendipity, such as midnight sessions at the Driskill Hotel where he stood a foot away from a grand piano as Jimmy Webb played “Wichita Lineman” and “MacArthur Park.” Along with the parking lot experiments of Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, who he remembers acted like a “mad scientist” synchronizing cassette tapes in a dozen cars.
“The cars have to be on for the tapes to play,” said Sherlock. “The carbon monoxide poisoning people just started sort of, you know, drifting out a bit.”
He also electrically recalled watching Fontaines D.C. play their first American show in a room of 100 people.
“The electricity in that room was just unbelievable,” said Sherlock. “You just stood there watching them going like, oh my gosh, this is going to happen.”
Hobbs describes driving to Austin for the first time in 2005 and never even making it downtown; he exited at Riverside Drive, went to the Back Room and stayed there all night. He enthusiastically reminisced about seeing UGK perform together after Pimp C’s release from prison. He remembers the notable moments of seeing Mac Miller, Kendrick Lamar and Kid Cudi show casing, and Wiz Khalifa standing on the corner of Sixth Street, not even getting bothered.
“You couldn’t do that today,” said Hobbs. “So just being able to see things at South by that you couldn’t see anywhere else was just incredible to me, and now knowing that that’s what I can dedicate my life to, ain’t getting no complaints out of me.”
The two came to their positions from rather non-traditional DIY backgrounds, as Hobbs admitted his path was rather abnormal and didn’t start at the company till he was 30. Hobbs studied a non-music field at Texas State University while critiquing how promoters ran local shows. He taught himself web design using a “WordPress for dummies book” and launched a Texas hip-hop blog during an era when there weren’t many, which eventually garnered attention. After learning SXSW needed somebody for hip hop booking, he jumped at the opportunity and has been at the company ever since.
Sherlock always wanted to let people know about good music that he thought they were missing. He wrote about music for his high school newspaper, ran his college radio station and then studied journalism and became a music journalist, worked at Hype Machine during the blog era and then eventually landed at SXSW in a penultimate role of turning people onto music they might not know about.
“It’s been a rewarding, but a long journey,” said Sherlock. “I sort of looked at a whole lot of different roles and found that, there aren’t that many that really let you turn people onto the music that you think is cool, but this is, this is it.”
According to the two, there’s going to be a good mix of industry, fans and people who just want to see a big, crazy, chaotic event.
“I mean, this is an industry event at its heart, so that’s what we program for, the talent discovery and the music conference side of things, like these are very industry focused, but we’re not going to ignore that a lot of fans and non-industry consumers are also coming here,” said Hobbs. “So, we need to book stuff for them also, but at our heart, we’re an industry showcasing event and that’s what we will always be.”
Sherlock compared their goal to the likes of opening a “cool bar” where the presence of industry insiders and taste-makers naturally attracts the wider public.
The undeniably huge structural shift for 2026 is the “squashing” of the traditional nine-day festival into a seven-day event where music, film and tech happen simultaneously.
“Music did benefit by getting an extra day out of that,” said Sherlock.
The main reason is, of course, they have an extra night that gives them over 50 more showcases to do, gives more plays to the bands that are coming and the opportunity to invite more bands. It also means that the more segmented aspect of all the people coming for the tech, innovation, interactive part of South by, who left when music was starting, is diminished.
“So they never even got to experience what this festival was really built on in the first place, and with this being the 40th year of SXSW, that means it’s the 40th year of music at SXSW because that’s what the whole festival was, only music for a certain amount of time, said Hobbs. “So now they get to experience what the festival was originally built on, what I consider to be the heartbeat of the festival… That’s a new crowd for the artist to get to play for, it’s just more people to put their eyes and ears on these artists, and that’s what this is all about.”
The festival’s reset has a focus on finding the sweet spot between the years where it was “absolute madness” and the more “scaled down years.” Supposedly, 2026 is going to show people how that is possible. There are big name artists, who won’t necessarily be performing in 60-foot Doritos vending machines, but they’re playing in some of the more iconic music rooms in America. However, they admit this isn’t going to happen overnight.
“I was one of the only people on the team who was working here during those years, and I don’t look at that like we have to get back to that,” said Hobbs. “I look at it like, we got to find a way to recapture some of that and then mix it with what we have going on right now, and not let that overshadow our core mission of talent discovery.”
As challenging as the pandemic was, it provided a bit of enlightenment insofar as the year afterward, when they came back and things were just naturally smaller. Fear crept in that the shrinkage was a bad thing, but that quickly ended when the industry came back and said that the year was a great experience. People enjoyed it, they could see who they wanted to see and navigate the festival more easily, so SXSW concluded that maybe they didn’t need to be massive, with 2,000-plus artists.
“I think we’ve really, after a couple of years since the pandemic, when we thought it might’ve been too small and other people were saying it was too large before, I think we’ve really found the sweet spot now,” said Sherlock.
There are eight programmers responsible for close to 1,100 artists who focus on specific niches. That is a lot of responsibility, but they are fully confident in their programming this year and can’t wait to get the festival started so they can see the public’s response.
“Our Latin music is continuing to just skyrocket,” said Hobbs. “We actually have a lot of country music this year that we haven’t had in past years. We have a lot of artists that are also in town with film and documentary premieres that are performing with us. And we’re never going to stray away from the talent discovery side… We always want to be that place where you can discover your next favorite band, or when you go to the Coachellas, the ACLs, the Bonnaroos of the world, when you see that headliner on stage, you can brag to your friends that you saw them at South by Southwest four years ago in a 200-cap room with a bunch of other crazy music nerds.”
Leave a Comment