Austin - Surrge launched its new social distribution network and music community at the SXSW festival over the weekend, which promises to reward fans who tell friends and others about their favorite artists' songs by giving them 10% or more of the sale price of songs resulting from their recommendations. The service will allow members to upload favorite songs, and then send links to streaming versions to friends, and receive referrals when friends then purchase DRM-free downloads.

When I first saw it on the conference portion of the SXSW website, I knew I'd be there: a conversation between Thurston Moore, the singer and guitar player in pioneering art-rock troupe Sonic Youth, and Steve Reich, the heralded American minimalist composer whose percussion masterworks include "Drumming" and "Music for 18 Musicians." Moore, at 49, is arguably the wisest elder of indie rock, his band Sonic Youth having cranked out some 16 albums since forming in the early 80's, while Reich, who is 72, is arguably the greatest living American composer, having influenced a subsequent generation of artists bridging classical music, rock, electronica, and even hip-hop.

Austin, Texas - Lou Reed is decidedly frosty on the notion of digital music. A classic audiophile. "Technology is making it easier to make things worse," he proclaimed during his keynote interview on Thursday at SXSW, with veteran music producer and 20-year collaborator Hal Willner. "If you are one of those people like me who like 'good sound,' you need good speakers, a good stereo, and (as an artist) your price of recording goes up, because you need a good mic, good cables...If you don't like good sound, go with MP3."

If last year's SXSW was Twitter's coming out party, this year it achieved utility status. A utility is something that is always on, and essential. To lose it would be to thrust yourself into the dark ages. Water, electricity, gas ... and Twitter. Sound like an exaggeration? Not for anyone who has spent the last few days watching the incessant live twittering at SXSW. Because not every reader is as tricked out in extreme geekdom as those at SXSW, here's a brief description of Twitter:

The South By Southwest conferences and festivals in Austin, Texas, have already kicked off and will go on through most of this week. On Sunday the conference buzz was about a keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which the interviewer, BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, was heckled for rambling non-questions. For those of you that are going, DMW is happy to once again bring you the hottest list of buzz bands and parties, courtesy of music publicist Fiona Bloom:

Austin, Texas - The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival announced on Monday that it has partnered with ON Networks, a distributor of original, HD shows across multiple digital platforms, to create the Greenlight Awards, "a competition aimed at discovering the next great, original and episodic digital series." Submissions will be reviewed from December through Feb. 15; the winner, who will be awarded $10,000 and a distribution deal through ON Networks, will be announced during the festival, which runs March 7-15.

Los Angeles - The Bigger Picture, a unit of digital cinema firm AccessIT, said on Thursday that it will offer a preview of a new in-theater digital concert series featuring performances from the South by Southwest Music Festival on July, 14, in advance of a nationwide run in the fall. The two-hour show, which was produced by Blaze TV and DirecTV, will be projected in digital cinema with 5.1 surround sound and feature performances from artists including The Polyphonic Spree, Peter Bjorn & John and Rocco Deluca. Tickets for the series are expected to range from $8.75 to $10.25, depending on the market. Previews will be held in Boston, Nashville, Dallas and Ft. Worth.

It might sometimes seem like everything is going micro.  With microlending, loans are getting smaller.  With online video, entertainment is getting shorter.  Technology devices are, of course, getting smaller. Micro is hot.  So it should come as no surprise that the next big thing coming fast into the marketing world is actually a little thing: microbrands.

Morristown, N.J. - Access Integrated Technologies (AccessIT), a provider of digital cinema delivery services, announced on Thursday that it has partnered with U.K. production company Blaze TV to produce and deliver performances from 24 bands at the South by Southwest music festival to movie theater screens.

Austin, Texas - Over the next week, I'll posting some of the other insights I will be taking from the event, but in the meantime here are just a few marketing ideas that struck me as remarkable or noteworthy from SxSW:

New York - Digital music service eMusic announced on Monday that it plans to produce and distribute live recordings from a set of concerts it will put on this week in Austin during the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. The concerts will be co-sponsored by Urban Outfitters and held at the store's outlet in Austin, and later distributed exclusively on eMusic and through Urbanoutfitters.com. Participating artists include The Broken West, 120 Days and Frightened Rabbit.