SXSW VP of Music Brian Hobbs Teases 2026 Festival’s Biggest Shows

South by Southwest has long given stages to emerging musicians, casting them a wider line to attract new fans and adapt the scene. This year, many of those artists have the chance to perform at multiple locations over the course of the seven-day festival; a benefit to both the musicians and audiences that felt necessary for SXSW vice president of music Brian Hobbs, who understands the time and money people spend to travel for the event. 

Coordinating all aspects of SXSW this year, which will be running in tandem for the first time in the festival’s history, is no easy feat. Hobbs invited the challenge as a way to make this 2026 SXSW stand out by meticulously coordinating with other areas of the festival, whether that be TV and film, comedy, or technology, to collaborate with even more artists. 

Den of Geek got the chance to speak with the VP about all the innovations to this year’s music lineup and the artists and experiences Hobbs is looking forward to. Below is a transcript of the interview. 

DEN OF GEEK: This year is especially exciting for SXSW because the comedy, film and television, and music programming are all running concurrently for the first time. What level of coordination and collaboration does it take to pull it off?

BRIAN HOBBS: We have a really good relationship with all the festivals inside SXSW, but this year music and film have been killing it together because they have some really great music documentaries and films premiering and then those artists are turning around and doing showcases with us. They’re already here promoting their films, so why not give the fans what they want, too? 

For instance, that’s how the Lainey Wilson performance came about. Lainey is down here with a Netflix documentary and we have one combo with her team. Cool organic stuff like that comes together. I don’t know what changed this year, but the collaboration has been for the better and things have been running so smoothly. We have six high-level film and music collaborations, which is the most that I can remember us ever having. 

There’s Charley Crockett. He’s been on a tear recently and spoke out about some stuff that country music artists don’t usually speak out about, politically, and we were like, hell, we’ve got to support Charley. So he’s coming with a full-blown film. He’s doing his film premiere and then headlining the Luck Reunion showcase. Los Lobos have a documentary and they’re going to come down and do like a pop-up set at the iconic Continental Club. There’s a secret Noah Kahan show that’s going to happen to go along with his documentary that’s premiering. Zhu, the DJ, did the score for a film called He Bled Neon and they’re doing an afterparty show and Zhu is going to do the DJ set there. 

What was the selection process for assembling this year’s programming? What are you looking for?

By the end of the festival, we’ll have over a thousand artists, whether that’s solo artists or bands. I think our peak number ever was in 2015 when we invited 2200 bands. It’s wild, but it’s also too much! We had to book a lot of venues and it was really chaotic. We’ve found a really good spot now where we’re booking about 50 to 55 venues a night and we’ve got a thousand total artists booked. So that gives them more opportunities to perform multiple times. 

We respect how much time, money, and energy it takes to come to SXSW, especially if you’re an international artist who has traveled across the world. We don’t want them to just have one performance once they’re in town, we want them to be able to perform multiple times in front of multiple different audiences and reach as many people as possible. We want them to have the best experience possible. We want SXSW to be part of your journey where you leveled up to the next level, no matter where you’re at. 

You’ve also got some exciting headliners assembled this year, including Junior H, Lola Young, The All-American Rejects, and Gogol Bordello. Why did these feel like the right groups to showcase and represent this year’s Music Festival?

I’ll start with All-American Rejects because that came together through such crazy synergy. I’m doing a lot of music discovery when one of my team members, Berkli Johnson, and I were seeing these like pop-up house party shows that All-American Rejects were doing. We knew we had to figure something out with them. I looked up who their agent is and it’s someone who I have a really long, successful history of booking shows at SXSW with. I sent him an email and he was like, “Man, get out of here, I just talked to the band about SXSW two days ago!” It was like fate. 

They’ve been so cool to work with and they’re going to headline our music opening party. This is my 13th festival and this is the biggest music opening party that we’ve done since I’ve been here. Then with Junior, we’ve been trying to get Junior for three years. I think some of that is the effect of his team seeing that Peso was here, Frontera was here. It makes sense for him to be here. There’s going to be people crying and falling out in the crowd! With Gogol, it was a situation of them coming through on tour and their booking agent hit us up. 

We’re so fortunate with Lola Young, too. We’re so blessed that she kept us on her schedule because she trimmed her 2026 schedule down to just a couple of things. She’s locked in now and stuck with us. She’s coming off her Grammy win and she’s just such a dope authentic artist. She’s played SXSW before as a developing act, so now it’s so cool to have her on this side of things. That’s what this shit is all about. We love an artist who comes here, plays a small show, and then their career blows up – whether we had an effect on it or not. It’s just cool to see whenever someone plays some smaller shows and then a few years later they’re headlining for Rolling Stone at one of our biggest shows of the week. 

You’ve been with SXSW for nearly 15 years now. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed in both the music industry’s trends and the types of people attending the festival?

We always try to either stay on the wave of the trend or like right in front of it. I think we’ve done a really good job of that, especially in the past five years or so. Our Latin music programming has just absolutely exploded through the stratosphere, but I also think that reflects the music industry in general. I mean, we just had Bad Bunny do one of the greatest Super Bowl Halftime Shows of all-time, in Spanish, and the explosion of regional Mexican music out here has just been like out of control. 

Our Latin music programming has kind of mirrored that. It really started in 2023 when we did a showcase with Del Records and they had Eslabon Armado perform – they were the headliners – and the night of their showcase they were releasing their new single, “Ella Baila Sola” with Peso Pluma. It was played at SXSW publicly for the first time before it was officially released and now it’s the highest streaming regional Mexican song of all time. This year we have Sony, Universal, Interscope, and Warner all coming in just to do Latin music showcases. So I think that we were definitely ahead of the curve on that. 

This year we have a lot of country, and we haven’t had a lot of country music in the past. We had a Garth Brooks show in 2017. We had a Keith Urban show and then some low-key Texas country stuff. This year though it’s the doors being kicked open. We’ve got Lainey Wilson. Charley Crockett. Los Lobos are back. We have a lot of really cool country stuff. That’s reflective of the music industry in general. Country radio used to kind of run it and now country streaming has blown up so much in the last few years. I think it’s opened it up to like a younger generation of fans. 

I haven’t seen a huge change in attendees, except maybe a little bit less of the spring break party crowd who want to come to just party. We’re seeing more real, dedicated music fans. The industry’s not going anywhere so we try to keep everybody in mind with our programming, but first and foremost we’re always going to program out showcases with talent discovery in mind. We’re always trying to introduce somebody to their next favorite band. 

Lastly, what are one or two under the radar selections from your SXSW Festival block that people need to check out?

I wish the whole team could answer this because everybody on the team has something that’s their speciality. For me, it’s a lot of the bigger stuff now. So it’s not going to be as underground, low-key. A band that I really love that’s coming this year is The Paradox. They’re in that same vein as the mid- to late-’90s, skate punk, pop punk explosion. You could throw a Paradox song in the middle of a mixtape with Blink-182, Goldfinger, and Less Than Jake, and they would fit in perfectly with them. So I’m super excited to see what The Paradox does down here. They’re playing a show at the Mohawk, which is the perfect venue for them. I expect some mosh pit action, some stage-diving, some real hot going on in the crowd. 

There’s a guy from Louisiana, but he’s based in Texas. He’s a soulful singer. His name’s Gavin Copeland, but he fits in perfectly doing hooks on hip-hop songs, too. Personally, he’s probably the artist who I could see coming out of the festival this year with agents, labels, and people chasing him. He’s had some real success on TikTok, but his music is deep, soulful, Southern, and he’s just incredibly talented. I’m really excited to see him come down here and open up a lot of people’s eyes.