While riding to SXSW with Finn Riggins, I quizzed them about where the money was in the music business nowadays, since album sales are dwindling. My theory was T-shirts were the new albums. But they told me it now comes from a plurality of sources.

And they weren't kidding. In addition to selling CDs, T-shirts, vinyl and downloads on the road, the band was contacted by a sports equipment company that wanted to license their song "Benchwarmers" for a compilation.

During a panel at SXSW on what is and what is not working right now in the music business, it was made pretty clear where the bulk of the money is and will likely remain: radio.

According to Jim Cady, the panel leader and the founder of Slacker Radio, the U.S. music market is a $27 billion industry, $21 billion of which is in radio. And though it's a fast-growing industry, Internet radio only accounts for a small portion of that business.

Cady said that for the 93 percent of Americans who report listening to music, 80 percent of their listening is done via radio. Before starting Slacker Radio, Cady created the Rio, the precursor to the iPod. He said passive listening dominates the market because it takes a lot of time and effort to create playlists. He shared data from a survey he did of iPod owners, who said that the majority of them spent the first 90 days ripping CDs and transferring them to their device before deciding it was too much work. That's why Cady said Internet radio is projected to grow at 125 percent a year for the next five years.

And while Pandora-style algorithms can learn quite a bit about your musical tastes, Cady said they do so slowly and often inaccurately because people's musical preferences are wrapped into emotional experiences tied to life experiences.

For those looking to make money in the industry, Cady offered these major market factors to consider:

-Connectivity is constantly improving and the ubiquity of smartphone technology is birthing a wide variety of Internet-connected devices. The most important of them is the automobile because 78 percent of all listening is done in the car.

-Revenue will now come from a blend of sources, such as subscriptions, advertising and physical sales.

-And finally, the increase in consumer choice that the Internet has brought has also brought an increase in demand. More music is being heard by more people now than ever before.

Now it is just up to you to figure out an innovative way to make money off it.

• Josh Gross
• Teens onstage at Headhunters during SXSW.

The band's showcase performance on March 17 at Headhunters during SXSW was no different. Though there were only a handful of people in the audience, the band held nothing back, bullying the crowd into taking part.

Beer was sprayed, choruses were shouted, and at one point, drummer Connor Robinson attempted to hurdle his set. Instead, he lost his balance, causing the kit to crumble to pieces with him in a twisted heap on top. The band jammed noise until Robinson could reassemble his kit and jump back in.

For the big finale, Teens threw their instruments in the air, caught them and, in a single windmill move, smashed them into the ground. By the end of the set, the band's equipment was broken, the bar was a minefield of debris, and guitarist David Wood had lost his glasses and a shoe.

That's why you don't leave teens, or Teens, at home alone to party.

Since the Boise SXSW showcase was held at a venue operated by the Independent Film Channel, the entire evening was professionally filmed. This was handy considering the majority of Boiseans couldn't make it down to Austin, Texas, for the showcase itself.

A few of the performances have already hit the Web. They look and sound fantastic. Check 'em out below.

The Atlantic ran an article this weekend that took the number of bands playing at SXSW in Austin, Texas, and cross-referenced those numbers with where the bands are from in order to find which cities have the hottest music scenes by the SXSW barometer.

Topping the list for entries are somewhat obvious places like New York, London, Austin and Los Angeles. But when the number-crunchers factored in the population of the cities to see what percent was being represented, a very different picture emerged, one that showed smaller towns ruling the festival.

Portland, whose shadow Boise always seems to be in, made neither list. But thanks to the nine bands from Boise playing at this year's SXSW, the City of Trees placed sixth, just behind Nashville.

From the article:

A panel of booking agents and independent musicians held a panel discussion at SXSW to make the case to touring acts that small markets, not high-profile appearances were the key to their financial success.

"The money is better in small markets," said Tim Drake, the president of The Roots Agency. "There is a lower overhead. Not only can you build a career in small market, you can make a better living."

He also said that because of things like radius clauses and media attention if you play a city, it can be up to 18 months before you can return, but if you play the suburbs and small towns around it, acts can do four to five dates with ease.

"We have artists who don't work three months out of the year," said Drake. "They work 11. And there are only so many times you can play New York City.

Rebecca Loebe is a songwriter who has spent the last several years making a middle-class living as an independent touring artist—or as she put it, a "well-dressed homeless person." Loebe said that she often schedules her tours to only play cities on week days, because her show may well be the only thing happening in a small town on a weekend, something that brings a lot more people to the show.

Another benefit Loebe spoke of was that small markets often take ownership in you as a performer because you, unlike larger acts, come to their town. That level of support translates to more sales. And as Drake added, "their money is just as good."

All the panelists spoke of the importance of found venues like house shows and advocated seeking out connections with community radio stations and tastemakers in towns who will seed an audience.

"in small towns you are not looking for a known venue," said Loebe. "You are looking for a passionate promoter."

Wednesday night, a handful of Boise bands took to the stage at SXSW for a Boise showcase. As reported by BW's New Media Czar Josh Gross, who's on the scene:

A capacity crowd packed into the Independent Film Channel's Vice Bar on Austin's famed Sixth Street strip Wednesday night to see some of Boise's best bands rock their hearts out.

More than 200 were through the door when Hillfolk Noir took the stage at 7 p.m., and they just kept coming, packing in tighter and tighter until there was prescious little room to move, even in the club's two balconies. After Hillfolk Noir's opening set, Le Fleur, The Brett Netson Band, Finn Riggins, Youth Lagoon and Built to Spill took turns kicking in the audience's ears.

Check out this slideshow of the scene at the Vice Bar that night.

• The fucking Boss. Any questions?

While waiting for the show to start, I spoke with a guy from Portland, Ore., who was offered $5,000 for his ticket to see Bruce Springsteen at the Moody Theater on Thursday evening. The tickets were nontransferrable, also required a wristband and were handed out by lottery, so the offer was irrelevant, though the man said he would have sold if he could have.

After experiencing the spectacle that unfolded shortly after that conversation, I am not sure I would have.

Springsteen is a legendary performer who was often credited with saving rock and roll. He is also incredibly popular with working-class, ordinary people. The reason for both of these things is the same: He works his ass off onstage. That hard work is something that is almost required to be visible when playing a stadium, but last night's show was a medium-sized theater that with two balconies had a capacity of around 2,700. I was on the floor. But it might as well have been the clouds.

Springsteen strutted and crooned, climbed atop and leaped from a grand piano to rally the crowd. The man even stage-dived. Three times. Earlier in the day at his keynote lecture, Springsteen discussed how the first thing he learned onstage was how to work a crowd, because, in the end, it was what really mattered. Watching him put it into practice was enthralling. There was a smile on his face nearly as big as those on the faces of the crowd. Springsteen understands performance is an act of symbiosis.

Rock legend Bruce Springsteen gave the keynote speech at this year's SXSW, or as he preferred to put it, "a series of keynotes," because pop is no longer unified into something assessable by a single keynote address.

In a flowing half-hour speech that was part slam poetry, part personal history and part singalong, Springsteen expounded his opinion that pop music has fractured itself into endlessly exclusive sub-genres. He rattled off a list of them that sounded like the shrimp speech from the Tom Hanks' film Forrest Gump that concluded with "nintendo-core."

"What I want to know is, what the fuck is nintendo-core?" Springsteen asked.

He felt this was the realization of famed rock writer Lester Bangs' thesis that no one would agree on anything after Elvis. 

"From this day forward, you'll have your heroes and I'll have mine," Springsteen quoted.

That there were a thousand bands in one town and doing something different was a marvel. This was something that he said would have been impossible when he started playing rock music because of the numbers alone.

Ashley Knotts, Nick Bodor, James Moody, Chris White and Michael Slaboch are no slouches. They book and mange for some of the most-important rock clubs in the country, like The Cake Shop, The 40-Watt and The Hideout, in happening places like Austin, Chicago, Brooklyn and Athens, Ga.

The five of them gathered for a panel at this year's SXSW conference to discuss their philosophy and techniques on how to take a club beyond being just a venue and to turn it into "a scene."

Though they agreed social media have changed promotional strategies, the core principles remain the same.

Some of them are:

Treat talent well, so they will want to come back and tell others. That gets you a higher quality of talent and sometimes for a lower price. Even things as small as a smile and a handshake when the band arrives can make all the difference. If your staff mistreats talent, fire them.

Don't turn on the lights and hustle everyone out the door. Create a space that performers want to hang out at even when they're not performing. That helps build the social swirl of ideas and makes people aspire to be on that stage.

Curation is good, but don't get too narrow a focus. Music alone, and especially one kind of music, isn't enough to compete from 10-2. Try out new things and keep it interesting. Club owners referenced the growing connections between outsider comedy and indie rock, as well as a long-running beard contest at an Austin venue as examples.

Position yourself well and try to stay abreast of routing when booking. Also make sure to do calendar checking to ensure a great act will have an audience. These were both reasons they all advocated an in-house booker.

Cultivate good relationships with neighborhoods and the city in order to build up an ecosystem around a club. Bodor even went so far as to say that soundproofing can be more valuable than bathrooms.

Don't be afraid to lose a few bucks on a show that will create a memorable experience people asssociate with the venue, a club set by a band who could play much larger rooms, for example. It builds the club's brand as a place not just to see music, but to have an amazing expereince.

And finally, they said, realize that there is no formula. The anarchic nature of art dictates that sometimes you just have to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. But the willingnes to do that, rather than just stressing about the bottom line, is what in the end creates a scene.

As nuts as the film and music portions of SXSW are, they are quickliy being eclisped by the juggernaut of the interactive conference, as nearly any big idea or new technololgy worth a dang is being launched there.

A quick stroll through the trade show section of the festival innundates even casual observers with so many big ideas, it almost feels combersome to carry them all out with you.

A particularly interesting one was from a company called Urthecast, which is installing cameras on the international space station that people can use to look down at a region and see what people are posting to Twitter. It should be live by the end of the year.

In the video below, a company representative demonstrates the technology.