Will SXSW return to Austin after shorter, decentralized 2026 festival?

Some pundits sounded the death knell for the South by Southwest Conference and Festival after it condensed its schedule and dropped its second weekend following the 2025 event. But organizers say the festival will return to Austin next year. Though dates are yet to be confirmed, discounted badges for the 2027 conference are already on sale on the event’s website. 

OK, phew. But what that festival will look like is anybody’s guess.

That’s because it’s a “prove it” year for the 40-year-old conference — and the ground’s shifting beneath it.

The Austin Convention Center, its longtime home base, was demolished last year. In 2026, SXSW is decentralized and only seven days long — not 10. The industry showcases for film, tech, education and music will occur simultaneously, with daytime programming for each track shifted to “clubhouses” at hotels and event spaces.  

Celebrities like Steven Spielberg will still give speeches. Headliners like the Lumineers, Orville Peck and Tune-Yards will perform free public concerts. A-listers like Demi Moore, Uma Thurman and Michelle Pfeiffer will attend red carpet premieres. Tech bros will tap iPhones at the JW Marriott. You, a local, can rub shoulders with ex-Disney child actors by crashing the right happy hours.

Yet the event is weathering a post-2025 staffing shakeup that ousted president Hugh Forrest, who oversaw SXSW’s emergence as a tech festival. It’s also navigating political unrest, visa complications for international artists and industry disruptions that put the conference at a crossroads.

In 2021, Penske Media Corporation acquired a 50% stake in SXSW, bringing with it a portfolio that includes publications like The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Billboard and Rolling Stone. The festival was flailing at the time. The coronavirus pandemic shut down the world on the eve of the 2020 event and forced a virtual couch fest in 2021. SXSW’s Vice President of Film & TV Claudette Godfrey says the media branch of the company reached out and asked, “How are you going to survive?”

The sudden influx of cash saved the event.  

“We wouldn’t exist without that,” she says.

According to figures provided by SXSW, the first in-person festival after the pandemic in 2022 drew roughly 42,000 conference attendees, while festival attendance reached 205,595. Altogether, the event generated an estimated $164.8 million for Austin’s economy. In 2023, total conference attendance reached 76,015, including both in-person and online participants. Festival attendance was 220,011, according to organizers.

In 2024, the conference drew more than 47,000 in-person attendees and over 180,000 YouTube viewers, while festival attendance was roughly 209,000. According to a festival report, the event’s economic impact climbed to $377.3 million, surpassing pre-pandemic highs. In 2025, conference attendance fell to 37,770, while YouTube viewership grew to 383,738. Organizers said roughly 203,000 people attended festival events last year.

On the ground attendance peaked in 2018, when about 432,500 people attended official SXSW events. Before the pandemic, SXSW regularly hosted 2,000 bands. Now it’s half that. 

“I think this year is going to be a big prove-it year,” SXSW VP of Music Brian Hobbs tells the American-Statesman. He’s an optimist: “We’re going to prove it. There’s not going to be any, like, second thoughts of ‘Is music dead at South by? ’”

James Moody, owner of SXSW music staple the Mohawk, says it’s become difficult to gauge the festival’s success. Lady Gaga and Drake aren’t luring spring breakers downtown like they did a decade ago.

“SXSW getting smaller is good in some ways because we have more access to smaller bands more often, and that was what it was always originally supposed to be — discovery,” Moody says. “A lot of that is happening again. It’s not the huge sponsors, huge bands, huge artists coming in on private jets. None of that’s happening.”

Yet that lack of wattage is what keeps the local service economy on edge. SXSW’s Sydney, Australia conference was canceled in January amid global economic uncertainty. 

In 2019, SXSW boasted “Super Sponsors” such as Capital One, Uber and Bud Light. Post-pandemic, the festival has highlighted sponsors such as Showtime, Dell and TikTok in 2021 and Slack, Porsche and Volkswagen in 2023. This year the festival rolls out California-based EV maker Rivian as a headline sponsor alongside seven other major companies, ranging from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to Walmart-owned Sam’s Club. 

Meanwhile, protests against Penske’s politics have damaged SXSW’s brand. In 2024, the event faced boycotts for including an exhibit and sponsorship from the U.S. Army and participation of weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, now known as RTX Corp. More than 80 artists and speakers canceled official appearances at the festival. In response, SXSW revised its sponsorship model to exclude weapons manufacturers.

What if corporate money dries up and the whole thing craters before spring 2029, when the new convention center is slated to open?

“It would suck,” veteran promoter Graham Williams tells the American-Statesman. “That’s a busy time of the year. A lot of money gets made at the bar. A lot of people have shifts. A lot of artists get to play. If that were gone, March would be painful in a pretty huge way.”

Until 2009, SXSW was where bands staged breakout live performances for a vast network of music biz decision-makers. Then the Interactive portion of the festival leap-frogged its music counterpart in stature as President Barack Obama and Elon Musk ate breakfast tacos, donned cowboy hats and spoke about the future.

Technology like Twitter, QR codes, drones and blockchains made elegant cases for their places in our daily lives. Incubators like the Capital Factory held startup crawls. In 2015, Facebook hosted an epic brunch buffet. Samsung hired D’Angelo to gig for 150 nerds that year, too.

Today, Film & TV has become the most relevant chunk of SXSW.

Its programming fills a niche in Hollywood, giving comedy, action and horror titles the red carpet treatment. So stars like Seth Rogen and Ryan Gosling show up. Jordan Peele premieres projects. Hulu, Netflix, Paramount Plus and Amazon Prime debut TV shows by Kevin Costner and Lizzo. CNN flew in your favorite CNN hosts for the CNN Plus launch party in 2022 — 30 days before the short-lived streaming service shuttered operations.

Godfrey describes a thriving ecosystem: One that can accommodate both the unknown filmmaker and the glitzy premiere.

“We do have these big, buzzy titles,” Godfrey says, “but the bulk of our movies are first-time feature directors.” Roughly half, by her estimate, are making their first film. Some have never shown work at a festival before.

If the present moment of SXSW Film & TV feels more concentrated, it is not smaller. The 2026 program includes 354 screenings and 118 features — 88 of them world premieres.

The scale now reflects a film festival that has grown in size—and ambition.

Spielberg’s movie isn’t ready to be screened, Godfrey notes, but she says Universal was still up for bringing him to Texas. That’s the cache of SXSW.

In the event’s early days, “all the indie labels knew about SXSW because they had their finger on the pulse,” publicist Fiona Bloom, who has attended the festival since 1991, tells the Statesman. “We just wanted to get out there, network, meet new people and hopefully get our bands discovered.”

What’s SXSW’s value to artists now that the music industry is decentralized and algorithm-driven? What’s the point of traveling here?

Cultural critic Andy Langer, who works at the University of Texas and has attended SXSW since 1991, is at a loss. He believes the festival in its heyday oversaturated the event, cramming over 2,000 bands into the schedule “so that even saying ‘I played SXSW’ has less meaning,” he tells the American-Statesman.

SXSW made the mistake of diluting the brand, alienating locals and allowing itself to become an “overblown brand carnival,” he says. Think Snoop Dogg performing in a giant Doritos vending machine or Taco Bell setting up a music venue that serves free food next to a shelter for unhoused people.

“SXSW became corporatized and more about pop culture than the independent music scene,” Bloom says. As brands spent money on activations, parties, open bars and flying in major artists, spring break hotel rates soared, and the event became prohibitively expensive for smaller acts. 

The goal of playing the fest used to be a record deal, Langer says. “The Four Seasons bar was where you wanted to wind up with an A&R guy.”

The music press was robust. The marketing budgets were bloated. So Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Red Bull, YouTube, MySpace and more could borrow talent and stage their own local, competing concerts.

But as the spectacle expanded, Bloom says many publicists and A&R folks stopped attending because it was “too hectic, too expensive and impossible to make noise or build a buzz.”

Even before the pandemic, the carnival was shrinking as brands stopped shelling out for big shows, spending instead on social media activations. “They’d rather take 30 influencers to Uchi,” Langer says. 

These days, free shows by Kanye West and Lady Gaga have largely been replaced by high-dollar hybrid events like the Rolling Stone Future of Music showcases, Billboard’s Stage at SXSW and the Coca-Cola Sips and Sounds Festival. Although part of the festival, the concerts are individually ticketed, allowing limited access to badgeholders on a first-come, first-served basis. Some public tickets sold out swiftly. At press time, resale tickets to see EDM artist Calvin Harris at Sips and Sounds were hovering around $275 and balcony seats for Mexican regional act Fuerza Regida’s Rolling Stone started around $375.  

But the vast majority of SXSW bands won’t reap the profits from these sorts of events. Showcase artists accept either a nominal stipend or conference and festival passes. The vast majority choose the credentials. Langer believes SXSW’s business model can even be detrimental for touring talent. Austin has become a major market, so why perform for free during SXSW? 

He struggles to “see the utility,» he says. 

Hobbs, of SXSW, disagrees. He maintains that the music conference offers musicians “five years’ worth of learning” in the span of “five days.” 

At the festival, artists can attend mentor sessions with industry professionals, they can make connections that place their music in films and video games. “One of the easiest, best ways to make  money and earn a living as a musician is getting sync licenses, and you can do that here,” Hobbs says. The festival has long leaned into convergence — see also Dolly Parton’s adventure in NFTs.

Hobbs says the festival is programming acts destined to headline “huge, open-field festivals.” 

NYC rockers Geese and British guitar duo Wet Leg are two post-pandemic SXSW acts that have fulfilled that vision. 

Andrew Cash, president and CEO of the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) that ran the festival’s “Canada House” activation for over a decade, says the group is opting out of SXSW for a second consecutive year.

“When you add [financial considerations] to the very clear animus coming from the White House towards Canada and the lack of clarity around just how safe people will be, it makes it hard for a trade association like CIMA to encourage its members to make that investment,” Cash says.

Matt Sonzala, a former SXSW music booker, says that international governments were giving artists more financial aid to perform at the festival 20 years ago.

“Pretty much all the countries around the world are not spending on the arts like they used to,” Sonzala says. “That puts more of a burden on the individual artist, record company or agency.”

Artists traveling to the festival on B-1 and ESTA visas are only legally allowed to perform at an unpaid “bona fide industry showcase” during their time in the country.

David Lobel, who founded booking agency Lobel Arts Associates, says coming to SXSW has always been a pretty big risk for artists. 

“People are getting hassled at the border and they’re seeing what’s going on on the news in this country. If you’re an artist looking to come, would you be that excited to potentially put yourself at risk or in a situation where you’re not as comfortable as you should be freely touring in the U.S.?” Lobel says.

“It’s absolutely a worry. We’re not going to downplay anybody’s fears,” Hobbs says. “We’re going to provide them with the best information possible so they can have a smooth entry over here.”

Artists are making it work all the same.

Malaysia-based musician and businesswoman Zamaera was invited to SXSW as an official artist in 2025. This year, she has put together the festival’s first official “Made in Malaysia” stage.

“The experience I had was so compelling and I had a lot of great opportunities arise that I felt it necessary for me to share this stage and create the opportunities for other artists from Malaysia to come and experience SXSW as well,” Zamaera tells the Statesman.

Zamaera says that the Malaysian crew she’s bringing to SXSW is independently funded.

“Our expectation is just to be there, that’s the goal,” she says. “It’s not like we’re expecting to get a recording contract from a big American label. I love making music and I want to share it with a side of the world that has never seen me perform before.”

That’s the spirit it’ll take to keep SXSW alive.