Even if you're not shelling out the $650 this year for the coveted SXSW music badge, RSVP'ing for the countless day parties or witnessing the next big thing perform in a sticky bar, the annual festival can still help you discover a bounty of new artists -- and all for free.

A few weeks before each of the previous three festivals, SXSW organizers released a BitTorrent collection of songs by artists on the bill. For reasons that are still unclear, they didn't release a torrent this year, but nice guy Greg Hewgill assembled one anyway. He's compiled 3.5 GB of DRM-free tracks from 764 of the 1,000-plus that are scheduled to perform, and all are available for free. Hewgill also archived the torrents from the previous three years, as well as two years' worth of film screeners and trailers. 

Get the torrents here.