SXSW 2025: APM Music’s Jim Cathcart Shares his Thoughts on this Year’s Event
- Ezra Broder
- Mar 20
- 5 min read
Over 300,000 people descend on Austin, Texas, every March to celebrate the best in arts, culture, and media. South by Southwest (SXSW) has become the go-to event of the year, boasting one of the largest music festivals in the country, a renowned film festival, and epic parties and celebrations.
What are the most critical takeaways from this year's event and why?
The quality and caliber of programming at SXSW has never been stronger than in 2025! I frequently found myself deeply engaged in conversation with fellow attendees, professionals from all industries, everyone from astronauts to breakout directors, computer scientists to music supervisors, discussing the various panels, films, new music trends, and emerging technologies presented by the conference. It remains true that SXSW provides an experience unlike any other in its ability to bring people together of different walks of life. Through this unique congregation, lasting relationships are forged and a shared spirit of collaboration embraced. Cinema is celebrated, culture is pursued, and progress explored.
Talk about specific panels you attended and what came out of those.
“Music Supervisors & Editors: Harmony In Post” was a fantastic panel discussion between the phenomenal music supervisors Brittany Douziech & Yvette Metoyer with the outstanding film/TV editors Tyler Cook, & Garret Price. They discussed how together they have power in shaping the show, world building, and creating the universe audiences will come to know from an early standpoint and just how important music is as a component of that storytelling process. Tyler had mentioned how a piece of music can dictate and drive an edit, how they often look for space for the scene or space for the music. The right instrumentation, the right tempo, the right support and finding the right marriage can inform the emotions of the audience. Editors want to put out the most fully realized cut, with sound design, music, and pacing. Giving the directors and producers the right tone while presenting a full vision. All of this is done in concert with the music supervisors whose expertise enables them to use the best music available to them based on a variety of factors including clearability, tone, and budget. It was nice to hear APM mentioned as well!
Other panels I attended revolved around the topics of AI & music. It seems like every year there is a hotbed of technology topics being dissected and/or promoted at SXSW. A couple years ago it was NFTs and back then it seemed like there were countless attendees peddling and praising their importance without being able to say what an NFT was with accuracy or certainty. While AI models have been continuing to push for their adoption over the past year, many of the panels seemed to revolve around two aspects in this regard: “is AI ethical?” or “how to use it ethically”.
I found Holly Herndon’s presentation “AI, Music & Creativity in the Imagination Age” to be a fascinating look at how she approaches training LLMs on her own controlled data to yield its output. She emphasized the need for agency within the process of utilizing AI tools as well as training protocols with creative intervention at every step of the model. Holly stated “it’s wrong to train your model on other people’s music or art” and as someone who believes in compensating creators as well as the benefits to human created work, I couldn’t agree more. With her company Spawning she has built a suite of tools such as “Have I Been Trained?” and “Kudurru” that actively blocks AI scrapers from your website.
Alternatively, there seemed to be a number of panels that promoted use of commercial AI generative music models that completely lacked foresight of their implications or the reality of their legal issues. This type of misinformation to music creators and users is both irresponsible and self-serving, delivered under the guise of access and advancement. A surface level discussion of these tools doesn’t paint the full picture. When in doubt ask about E&O insurance and Terms of Service or call me to discuss.
Film festival – which films stood out to you and why?
The Documentary Shorts and Texas Shorts were by far the best I’ve seen in years! With standouts like “The Goldfish Club” and “Tiger” the score brought both films to life. From the use of minimal but sonorous stereo recordings of autoharp and flute to massive synth in “The Goldfish Club” to the energetic mixtape that made “Tiger” feel like a visual song itself, I was captivated. At the Texas shorts APM had music in both “Red Sands”, an engaging documentary about an off-roading community and their culture in El Paso, and “Neuro” a love letter to eerie futurism of the 60s/70s aesthetic. Additionally of the 19 productions that utilized APM, I enjoyed “Spaceman” which features 82-year-old JPL lab engineer Gentry Lee discussing the historical importance of the Viking I&II missions, the Voyager mission, and whether we may be alone in the universe. He emphasized just how amazing it is that we exist on this planet at this time. A real standout was the multi-hyphenate award winner at SXSW this year “F*cktoys” which has received immediate praise from Roger Ebert, Indiewire, Deadline, and Letterboxd. Director Annapurna Sriram’s 16mm vision harkens seminal filmmakers John Waters and Greg Arraki with nods to Clockwork Orange, but all told through her own voice. It celebrates stylized and unapologetic independent cinema, featuring incredible performances and an amazing archival soundtrack. I saw many other films this year but the last one I caught was “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror” which, as a fan, felt like the most complete documentary I’ve ever seen on the subject. It included cast interviews, a mountain of archival footage, and contemporary reflections/acoustic performances by Richard O’Brien. It does what good documentaries do, it tells an engaging and complete story that resonates with its audience. Take me back and let’s do the timewarp again!
How does music help filmmakers tell powerful or entertaining stories?
I’ve long believed there is a magic that exists when the right song is synchronized to the right moving image. It’s unlike any other experience you can have as a creator or an audience member. It’s emotional, it’s personal, and it’s storytelling. It’s why I love what we do at APM, truly. We get to help creators realize their vision in a collaborative way enabling them the ability to harnesses the power of incredible authentic recordings. To see and hear their projects come to life on the screen, there’s simply nothing better than that!
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