SbyebyeSX

Now this is a nice story: apparently Metallica surprised everybody with a small club gig at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, TX. I'm searching for blogs as we speak to get eyewitness accounts from people in the audience who were expecting to see a show by one of the many up & coming, unsigned young bands who probably spent the night sleeping in their van so they could play the show and yet were treated to a set by the world's best-selling heavy metal band who joked about being FROM Norway, which might seem funny to some since they recently BOUGHT Norway. What a great night that must've been!!!! Wow!!! Paid money to go to the show and stand on the precipice of discovering the newest art forms music is about to take? SHEW!!! Bullet dodged - you'll get to hear another bone-crushing version of Enter Sandman instead!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!! - XMASTIME

Apparently it's gotten even worse, according to THIS ARTICLE in which the writer declares she's not going to SXSW again:

And each year, more and more celebrity-sized acts and corporate conglomerates seem to crash the party. Remember when Kanye West stole all the SXSW headlines in 2011 by setting up camp at a massive abandoned power plant and throwing a star-studded, Vevo-sponsored blowout? It hollowed out downtown Austin and led to paltry attendance at the actual festival's closing night activities. That stunt was on a scale that only a pop star like Kanye could pull off, but it signified a sea change that some attendees had seen coming for years. The extracurricular parties that happen during SXSW had outgrown and overshadowed the festival itself. And in this era of pageview-chasing journalism, which events do you think the media are going to cover: The fledgling band playing a tiny club on Sixth Street, or the celeb throwing the once-in-a-lifetime rager?