Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Austin 100

NPR

In the middle of every March, the SXSW Music Festival fills Austin, Texas, with thousands of musicians from around the world. It's a marathon so daunting — it's a marathon and a sprint, really — that even longtime SXSW veterans need a hand winnowing the festival's countless discoveries down to digestible doses.

That's where The Austin 100 comes in. Handpicked from thousands of bands playing at this year's festival, these 100 songs highlight the best SXSW 2018 has to offer — songs from around the world, across a broad spectrum of genres, sounds and styles.

Here's how you can listen: You can stream songs on each artist's page; you can listen to a playlist in the NPR One app; and if you're a Spotify user, you can stream most of the mix via our Austin 100 playlist.

These six-plus hours of music are only the beginning of NPR Music's SXSW 2018 coverage: You will eventually find more recommendations, conversations, videos and dispatches from this year's festival at npr.org/sxsw. But in the meantime, enjoy the music!


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

Tags
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.)