It was a tale of extremes at the South by Southwest musical festival and conference in Austin, Texas, on Thursday afternoon. On one side, heavy hitters such as Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter and executives from BET discussed artist development, if the term development means creating a star. About an hour later, R.E.M. attorney Bertis Downs and members of the independent label community discussed simply how to survive.

“I wouldn’t be an optimist,” said Darius Van Arman, a principle at Jagjaguwar Records. “There are more and more pressures [today]. But it feels like we’re going to make this work. The artist, the label and the manager are all working together toward similar goals, but it needs to become simpler … A lot of times things are set up so it seems like people are working against each other.”

As far as advice on how to make it as a major league star, the usual marketing buzz words were tossed around. The term “branding synergy” was used, with veteran industry lawyer L. Londell McMillan noting that consumers today want to feel that they’re buying more than just music. Create a brand, a backstory and then you’ll have something.

It was a momentary SXSW dip into the mainstream. No doubt there’s always been a divide between the Lady Gagas and Arcade Fires of the world, yet even in a year in which both can compete for a major Grammy Award the varying trajectories of the music biz seem as apparent as ever.

Jordan Kurland, who manages Death Cab for Cutie, She & Him and Bob Mould, among others, noted that majors, despite their diminishing staffs, are still pushing so-called 360 deals, which seek to take a cut of every facet of an artist’s career. And sometimes they can get a little pushy.

While he didn’t mention the band, Kurland noted that one of his artists signed to a major before 360 deals were all the rage. “I can’t tell you how many conversations we have where the label says, ‘Well, if we had the broad rights,’ ” Kurland said. “They’re not really hiding the fact that they’re going to spend more money on artists signed to 360 deals.”

The question then was raised whether labels such as Jagjaguwar, which is part of the Secretly Canadian family, could sustain its 50/50 model with diminishing returns from masters. The label group, home to the likes of Bon Iver and Okkervil River, among others, takes the traditional indie approach, splitting profits -- after marketing costs -- equally with the band.

Van Arman handled the question with caution, noting that “we don’t fight the market, and people don’t value music right now.” He envisioned, perhaps, a future in which labels could take on more management-like duties, but one that’s also more artist-friendly.

“I don’t think labels need to be predominant,” Van Arman said. "There’s less dollars in the market and less dollars for everyone to share. So maybe [the answer is] there’s less people to share.”

Added R.E.M. attorney Downs, “The companies that were around 10 years ago and were treating artists fairly are the ones who will still be around.”

Other notes from Day 3 of SXSW:

Ext. The line for James Blake snaking outside Stubbs -- night

Claims overheard while eavesdropping in line (may or may not be true).

"James Blake cured my son's case of scurvy with his soothing electro-gospel."

"James Blake's cardigan is so silken yet soulful that if you touch it you may turn into marble."

"Have you heard? James Blake is passing out gift certificates to Banana Republic and the Economist to the adoring crowd!"

"Why is everyone waiting to see the 138st best tennis player in the world?"

Twenty-one-year-old London electronic music prodigy James Blake is in an enviable position. A string of EPs created feverish anticipation for his self-titled debut, which also marked his transition into a singer-songwriter from a producer carving up samples and setting them to post-dubstep beats. 

Think Bon Iver if he'd exchanged his log cabin and beard for chinos, a stack of Billie Holiday records, a cracked copy of production software Ableton and a prominent place at seminal London dubstep club FWD. Whereas most of the South by Southwest attendees can't tell the difference between Spaceape and Space Ghost, Blake has emerged on their radar largely because he couches his beats in recognizable forms: singing, lyrics, Feist covers.

He's also preternaturally talented and sports the sort of well-groomed affability of a chap you'd want to date your sister. He's the sort of person who makes you want to use the word "chap." And at Stubb's, he had a massive crowd breathless, with his ultra-patient paens to love and loss -- the only decent topics for songwriting (that and bringing the ruckus). Which is the thing -- Blake's new tunes perpetually fail to bring anything above a pensive murmur. They're thoughtful and sad, but often oppresively boring. For all his gifts, his ability to write songs isn't as fully formed as is his compositional ability.

Under the soft lights and smoke of the outdoor venue, Blake's cracked falsetto swooned and soared, twisting and fluttering. It simultaneously managed to be dazzling and dull. Hearing songs such as "The Wilhelm Scream" (video above) in person had a poignance and power that triumphed over the large venue and outdoor acoustics. After all, he had a guitarist and drummer with him to help shore up the paper-thin constructions. It was electronic gospel, but it lacked the evangelical fervor of the best of the genre. It was pretty and well-groomed, but more Anglican than Baptist -- veneration but no violence. Slow dance music for unreconstructed Coldplay fans.

It's tough to hate on James Blake. He's a likable boy wonder who has great potential for a phenomenal career. But in the  moment, it felt like the soundtrack to singing campfire votives to the Lord while intermittently roasting marshmallows and reading the Economist.

-- Jeff Weiss at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas

Two years ago at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, Nite Jewel played a rambling and ostensibly ad hoc set at a backyard party sponsored by New York party impresario Todd P. Seemingly everyone was dressed with the shrill flouresence of an equatorial fruit, and frontwoman Ramona Gonzalez hid behind a pair of comically oversized glasses you'd expect to see on Chloë Sevigny.

At the time, it was just Gonzalez and her bandmate Emily Kuntz, who played keyboards and triggered samples when the sampler was working. It was a charmingly ramshackle performance befitting of a young woman who had only begun taking music semi-seriously 12 months prior. Playing songs that had initially been recorded on eight-track, she relied heavily on the amethyst tint of her keyboards, her gauzy levitative voice and a caustic mocking stage presence that seemed to treat the crowd with the absurdity of its outfits.

That iteration of Nite Jewel is dead. Onstage at the Force Field PR/Terrorbird day party Wednesday was a professional and polished outfit befitting the gemstone in the band's name. Gonzalez's songs have a casual burnish to them -- they drift along hazily but inculcate a sort of narcotic demand. They're the sort of things you go back to and detect a form you initially overlooked. They're powerful, lithe and straight-up funky.  After all, Dam-Funk, the messiah of modern funk, doesn't work with you if you aren't.

To put it in broad terms, there are essentially two ways to tackle the annual South by Southwest festival and conference. One can spend the time in Austin, Texas, stressed over how to navigate 2,000 bands, a multitude of day parties and industry panels. Or one can just let the schedule go by the wayside, as things go as planned in Austin about as often as a showcasing band has time to do a proper soundcheck. 

Plenty wasn't working right during EMA's Wednesday night set. Yet the lack of working stage monitors didn't derail Erika Anderson's solo project. She did what any self-respecting SXSW performer would and didn't let sound issues slow down or delay her set. After all, there's a little bit of punk rock at the heart of Anderson's songs, which give what could have been folksy confessionals a more aggressive framework. 

While EMA hasn't released its debut full-length yet, some adventurous Los Angeles music fans may be familiar with Anderson. Her first band, Gowns, did some time in the Southland, and Anderson has performed with the long-running experimental outfit Amps for Christ. As EMA, Anderson takes a more conventional song-based structure and then adds and strips away with a multitude of sounds -- a scraping fiddle, background tape hiss, sharp and minimalist guitar strikes, and a sampling of electronics. 

Songs may start low-key, but just when one thinks Anderson is going soft, momentum gradually builds into a more rapacious release. And Anderson knows her music history as well. In Austin, she performed an abbreviated version of her take on Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman" -- the blues reshaped into a slow-burning rock song, complete with curt, effects-laden guitar notes.

"I have a 17-minute version of that song," Anderson told a small but appreciative crowd. "It's all feedback. Feedback is beautiful, right?" In Anderson's hands, no doubt.

Other notes from Night 2 of SXSW:

About 1,200 miles separate Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles, but at the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, that distance can sometimes feel even greater. On the first full day of action at SXSW, early risers -- and patient ones -- could catch Jack White performing two songs in front of a bus, and U.K. upstarts the Vaccines giving a modern gloss to Buddy Holly-influenced rock, all while performing songs, in front of a church no less, that pondered dating a 17-year-old. 

Meanwhile, lines stretched for hours to get into the so-called "Fader Fort," which is now a SXSW tradition. This year's sponsor is Fiat, but the Fader Fort still looks and feels as if it were erected in a war zone, although instead of revolutionaries, there are models waiting to tell you about new cars, and full days of sets from nearly every blogger-buzzed artist in Austin. First up Wednesday was the keyboard-glazed pop of Tori Y Mori, who aren't even appearing at an official SXSW show. 

Inside the Austin Convention Center, four days of industry panels began with Martin Atkins, who has performed with Public Image Ltd. and was a founding member of industrial act Pigface, throwing muffins into the crowd while dispensing do-it-yourself advice, complete with plenty of four-letter words.

"If all the bands in your area have a guitar, bass and drums," Atkins said, "play a fish."

His message was one of staying independent, standing out and building momentum, urging acts that "free is the new black" and not to get too obsessed with the latest technology. "It's not how you communicate, but what," Atkins said, later urging acts to play the smallest venues possible for the simple sake of being able to say it was sold-out. 

As one-half of the now-defunct White Stripes, Jack White is surely afforded the ability to forgo such DIY and attention-grabbing strategies. Yet those in the know were treated to an impromptu White performance on the streets of Austin about noon. Though he played only two songs -- Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and the White Stripes' "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" -- word soon reverberated through the town about the "you-had-to-be-there" moment. 

The scope of the SXSW 2011 music conference is relatively easy to quantify. There are 2,000 bands playing over five days in Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest. Harder to define, however, would be the music business in 2011. 

Breaking from tradition, SXSW music performances began Tuesday evening, allowing the first day of SXSW music to overlap with the SXSW interactive conference. Yet with only nine clubs hosting bands -- 10 if one counts the multiple rooms of Emo's as two venues -- one may have expected a relatively low-key evening.

Heck, even the once-hefty bags of swag given to each registrant contained nothing more than official SXSW programs and schedules. Gone were the CDs of unsigned artists and the fluorescent earplag, as well as the dozens of magazines and fliers that littered hotel rooms.

Welcome to a leaner SXSW music festival? Not quite, as Night 1 contained one not-so-secret show (the Foo Fighters), multiple street closures, a bounty of drunk twentysomethings and an occasional overflowing club. Not all SXSW traditions are dying, of course, but priorities are noticeably shifting. Paid registration for SXSW Interactive, for instance, continues to swell and last year topped that of SXSW Music. 

An influx in recent years of mainstream artists -- this year brings appearances by the Strokes and Duran Duran, among others -- continues to draw media attention away from the unknown to the more predictable and also puts a greater emphasis on promotion rather than artistic self-preservation. Yet, for now at least, the underground still dominates SXSW, and some weird and noteworthy artists could be found just two hours into the event.

English three-piece Esben & the Witch was one such act. Their beautiful gloom took over what is normally a top-40 dance bar. Rock 'n' roll may not have been the music of choice at Spill, which seemed evident after band leader Rachel Davies spent about 10 minutes slowly thwacking a bass drum till the noise suited her, yet Esben & the Witch seemed the ideal band to fill unexpected crevices. 

Alternating moments of grandeur with explosions of fury, with all three members occasionally breaking from a swelling guitar crescendo to put the music on militaristic alert by simultaneously pounding away at the single drum that stood at the front of the stage, Esben & the Witch were gothic artisans. Songs were built from the drip-drip-drip of paranoid electronics, but guitarists Daniel Copeman and Thomas Fisher attacked the fear with brooding guitars that managed to be equally loud and calming.

Davies, however, works the stage as something of a possessed force. Rarely without a pair of drumsticks in her hands, she is ready to strike, regardless of what is or isn't in her way. At times, she just settled for pounding her thigh. Yet often when she sang, she wasn't an aggressor and instead worked the lyrics as if seeking atonement.

Other notes from Night 1 of SXSW 2011:

There’s one reason why sonic melting pots such as IHEARTCOMIX records' monthly event Check Yo Ponytail 2 manage to survive: The mish-mash lineups generate a lot of energy.

Tuesday’s record release show for Brooklyn, N.Y.-based punks the Death Set marks the seventh CYP2 show at the Echoplex since it resurfaced in November. Adding a slew of high-octane buzz bands to the bill, CYP2/IHC founder Franki Chan continues to help desegregate L.A.’s heavily partitioned music landscape.

The woofer-rattling lineup at the Echoplex also includes hip-hoppers Ninjasonik, Low End Theory resident Gaslamp Killer, electro poptress Zowie and garage rock hybrid Biker’s Daughter.

“They may be different genres, but they all have the same type of energy and they’re all coming from the same place, how they want to do music,” Chan said. “They’re all people that exist as leaders of their own scenes.”

Started in 2006 at the now-defunct Safari Sam’s, the original CYP was meant to be a band-focused alternative to the hoard of DJ nights in L.A. As the sweat-soaked parties grew in stature, the club got really big, really fast. In 2008, Chan halted CYP at the peak of its popularity to focus on his label and his DJ career.

Since its reemergence in November, CYP2 has opened its doors for underground acts of all pedigrees.

“There’s so many great artists in L.A. and so many things going on, but as far as live shows, it feels very broken up,” Chan said. “You go to Hard L.A. for dance stuff, you go to FYF shows to see punk stuff, and there’s nothing really in the middle ground… We just wanted to have an event that could show that.”

Tonight's Death Set  show offers L.A. crowds an evolved brand of three-chord savagery a la Beastie Boys. The impending release of its sophomore full-length, "Michel Poiccard" (out today on Counter Records/Ninja Tune), effortlessly  aligns with CYP2’s eclectic bent.

“The record isn’t just a punk record,” said vocalist Johnny Sierra. “There’s song that I think you’d be whistling down the street as well as sweating at a show to. There are different styles that we took on for this record that I’m really glad that we did.”

All this growth came in the face of debilitating loss over the course of 2010 as the band pressed on with the record after the 2009 passing of former guitarist Beau Velasco.  That, combined with Sierra and guitarist Dan Walker’s recent move from Baltimore to Brooklyn (by way of Gold Coast, Australia), has made for a rather hectic year thus far.

With Velasco’s spirit permeating Death Set’s record in everything from samples of his voice to unabashed song  title tributes (“I Miss You Beau Velasco”), the band rages on and whirls into its L.A.  record release show at CYP2 with full force displayed in tracks such as “Slap Slap Slap Pound Up Down Snap.” The track even comes with its own handshake,  a tidbit that’s certainly worth learning if you plan on raging at Tuesday night's show.

If you're headed to Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest, IHEARTCOMIX will be celebrating with a party at the Beauty Bar on Thursday. The Death Set will be performing there too, along with an impressive roster including She Wants Revenge, Pictureplane, Big Freedia and Chan himself on the decks.

-- Nate Jackson

Shawn Chrystopher looked more academic than hip-hop when he emerged onstage for a recent gig at West Hollywood’s Key Club. His thick, black-framed spectacles, cropped jacket, skinny jeans, tucked-in dress shirt and baseball cap looked more polished than the performers who followed.

Backed by three hype men, Chrystopher dove into an abbreviated set of tracks from his first full-length album, “You and Only You,” and cluster of mixtapes, offering a warm-up for the live showings he plans to deliver at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas.

The Inglewood native strives to stand apart from the influx of emcees coming out of the Southland, which he does in other ways beside his fashion sense. Instead of rapping about cars, money, curvy girls and popping bottles, his lyrics traverse more emotional terrain such as an ex-girlfriend aborting their child without telling him, and breaking the news to his mother that he was quitting undergrad.

Not following a typical hip-hop mold is a reflection of the 24-year-old’s less than traditional path to music. An aspiring filmmaker, he spent his high school years going to school six days a week taking film classes at the University of Southern California -- they eventually offered him a scholarship. He put his proficiency of five instruments to use by scoring the music to the films he was working on in school.

Chrystopher said it was only a matter of time before he began pairing the music he was crafting with his affinity for poetry –- a marriage that proved problematic once he began college.

When ticketing and promotion giants Live Nation and Ticketmaster pledged to merge in 2009, the companies promised a fan-friendly operation with greater transparency. Yet when it came to addressing industry concerns at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas -- the largest music biz gathering in the country -- top executives from the newly christened Live Nation Entertainment were no shows. 

That changes in 2011, when Nathan Hubbard, the CEO of Live Nation Entertainment's Ticketmaster outfit, will appear on a Friday morning panel dubbed "Indie Davids Take On Goliath Ticketmaster-Live Nation."

Related: SXSW 2011: The music stories to watch

The conversation will be moderated by Andrew Dreskin, CEO of the ticketing upstart Ticketfly. Those slated to speak include Spaceland Productions head Mitchell Frank, John Read of the Department of Justice, Boche Billions of independent booker the Billions Corporation and Andrew Kaplan, the talent buyer for Chicago-based JAM Productions.

For nearly any other musician, the first question about a gap of a decade between albums would be: What took so long?

For Bob Geldof, the man who literally helped change the world by spearheading humanitarian efforts on behalf of sick and starving millions in Africa, the question about his new cheekily titled album “How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell” is how he squeezed out time to write songs and record while tending to his globe-spanning efforts over the last 10 years.

It’s a legitimate question to the man himself, who was surprisingly relaxed and even — believe it or not — happy as he sat on a quiet afternoon last week in the restaurant at his West Hollywood hotel during a brief stop on his way to the South By Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, where he’ll not only perform with his band but also deliver this year’s keynote address.

In decades past, the onetime leader of the Irish punk group Boomtown Rats has sometimes fidgeted through interviews, suffering the process not gladly but as a necessary evil that comes with the territory.

These days, however, he’s of a mind to talk about the hard road that’s led him, as he approaches the age of 60, to a newfound sense of joy in his personal life, something that hasn’t always been commensurate with the remarkable shifts in public attitude and political policy he’s helped bring about as the driving force behind 1985’s Live Aid global concerts and the subsequent Live 8 shows that rocked the world of music and international politics.

“If you’re involved in that sort of stuff, it’s all empirical,” he said with the sharply enunciated Irish brogue that’s become so familiar over the last quarter-century of his high-profile campaigning. “It’s a facility: You can do it or you can’t. … Certainly music has a separate function, and it’s the more dangerous one because it’s of the self.

Part industry gathering and part spring break party, festival/conference South by Southwest Music will experience something of a growth spurt in 2011. For the first time in the 25-year history of the Austin, Texas, event, SXSW will stage showcases on Tuesday night, launching a day earlier than has been typical. Thrilling news it is not, but it could also be viewed as an indication as to where the music industry is heading.

With 2,000 artists ready to dive head-first into an industry in decline, SXSW has seen its music portion grow in turbulent times. There are  more acts than ever, and no doubt SXSW Music draws more of a nonpaying crowd than SXSW Film or SXSW Interactive, but with corporate-sponsored parties day and night, one can go to Austin sans badge and see nearly every buzzed-about artist one could wish for -- and drink and eat for free to boot.

It's a party, sure, but not everything is rosy. Overall recorded music sales in the U.S. continue to suffer double-digit declines, and even SXSW gets the fun started with a Wednesday morning panel titled "Welcome to the Music Industry, You're ...."

Last year music registrants were a healthy 13,000, but in terms of paying customers, SXSW Music wasn't the biggest draw. SXSW Interactive, which wraps Tuesday this year, swelled to more 14,000 registrants, marking the first time SXSW Music wasn't out front. So when SXSW organizers added Tuesday night concerts, the move allowed for an interactive and music overlap. The Web, after all, is the industry's saviour -- or perhaps its partner, or perhaps its conqueror, depending on which speaker has the floor. 

Austin hotel space likely makes it impossible that SXSW Music & Interactive could ever fully run concurrently, but with the number of acts getting cozy with sites and corporate sponsors, finding traces of the more traditional music business in Austin is like striking out on an old-fashioned A&R talent hunt. Yet the sheer number of artists, brands and parties on parade in Austin will make one thing clear: The allure of rock 'n' roll dreams remains as enticing as ever.  

Stay tuned to Pop & Hiss for updates from SXSW, and what follows is a look at some plot lines to watch.

The local angle: SXSW was good to Best Coast and Fitz & the Tantrums last year, and the press corps are already lining at the starting gates to chase down SoCal rap collective Odd Future. The act, which falls somewhere between offensively entertaining and weirdly fascinating, is already the center of a media frenzy. With every music journalist, critic and blogger descending upon Austin, expect Odd Future to experience a full social-media life cycle in Austin -- the blowup, the backlash and then the backlash against the backlash.

Yet there's plenty more this fair city has to show off down in Texas. Local nonprofit KCRW-FM has its tastemaking paws all over folk-rock duo the Belle Brigade, granting the act a prime slot at the station's always well-attended showcase. Dance duo the Cataracs may not be the kind of act to win over jaded critics crawling around SXSW, but the hot production team (Far East Movement, Snoop Dogg) aren't going to need reviews. Closely aligned with the latter is would-be pop-star Dev, and the reference point there is Ke$ha, but Dev is out to prove she's a character of more depth. 

Keep an eye on Voxhaul Broadcast, who with at least six SXSW shows should awaken many to its friendly and soulful power pop. More polished, yet also bringing some freshness to the power-pop formula are Saint Motel, whose music should be a gift to a number of music supervisors roaming SXSW. Garage-rocker Hanni El-Khatib is a high-energy must-see, and much-loved rapper Blu is finally on target to release his major label debut. Shamefully overlooked thus far is the Merge Records debut from Apex Manor, whose "The Year of Magical Drinking" is a sharp collection of jangly grown-up rock, while the spooked electronic soundscapes of Zola Jesus will no doubt attract more attention. Also worth monitoring is young female rapper Marz Lovejoy.

We're not sure which is weirder: that Fat Possum Records would connect with L.A. hip hop posse Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, or vice-versa. The Mississippi-based imprint began as a renegade Southern label dealing in classic raw blues by R.L. Burnside and T Model Ford, among others, but has since expanded to break everyone from the Black Keys to Lissie to the Smith Westerns. The label announced Wednesday morning that it will be remixing and remastering "Blackenwhite," by the Odd Future-related project Mellowhype. The full-length dropped on the Odd Future website on Halloween as a free download and became part of the first wave of buzz that propelled the savvy crew from South L.A. onto a national stage. 

Comprised of Hodgy Beats and Left Brain, the album's opening couplet captures the essence of the project: "It's a Monday night I'm coming home like it's a Friday/Everyday high I'm burning kush on the highway." The 16-track release features appearances by some of Odd Future's most high-profile members -- Tyler, the Creator (whose solo debut will come out on XL Recordings in the spring), Earl Sweatshirt, and the crooner Frank Ocean. It will come out on CD and vinyl this summer.

And expect Odd Future to own South by Southwest this year. The rollout on the many Odd Future projects to come will reach a fever pitch in Austin, Texas, where the collective will close out the mtvU Woodie Awards on March 16.

Related:

Odd Future's Tyler the Creator signs one-album deal with XL Recordings

Odd Future destroys 'Late Night With Jimmy Fallon'

-- Randall Roberts