For those among us who get vertigo at the idea of shelling out over a thousand dollars for a full-access badge, SXSW Sydney have announced that Music wristbands will be available from Fri 25th Sep.
That link will above will give you the full rundown of what you get but, in a nutshell, wristbands will get you “access” to all the live music and none of the conference stuff. They’ll cost you $280 – that’s in AUD, and is at the Early Bird rate which will go up at some point, but is still a lot cheaper than the (current) $1200 or so you’d pay for a Music badge. The catch is that you’ll still be in the queue behind an insufferable bunch of badge holders (👋), but as long the venue doesn’t reach capacity with badges before they start letting in the wristbands, you’re good to go.
I’ve been to SXSW in Austin a bunch, and while I always had a badge, a ton of my friends who lived in Austin always went the wristband route. The way it worked was that there were two queues – one for badges and one for wristbands. Once the badges were in, the wristband queue was let in until full.
There were always shows that my wristband friends couldn’t quite get into (even when they were at the very front of a wristband queue), but there was never a show they couldn’t eventually find to go to. While they missed out on a maybe a handful of really top-shelf choices (the Stax Records night in 2007 was an example), they still saw just as many shows as I did.
When the wristband costs less than a quarter of a full badge, that’s not a bad tradeoff – and when you think that going to see even one show at a place like the Qudos Arena can easily top that cost, it’s actually pretty cracking value for four days and nights of live music.
SXSW Sydney Music wristbands go on sale on Fri 25th Aug, available from sxswsydney.com