For decades, when visitors arrived in Austin for South by Southwest, the first thing they did was head to the Austin Convention Center to pick up their badge.
If they try that this year, they’ll be confronted with a massive hole in the ground, and that’s just the first shift to what people have come to expect from the festival and conference. SXSW Senior Vice President of Content Meghan Cassin said, “Even if you’ve been to South By in the past, this will feel like your first time going to South By.”
Navigating and overseeing the changes was one of Cassin’s first jobs at the festival. When she joined SXSW in 2024, she was assigned to a task force combining what she called “South By O.G.s who’d been here for at least 15 years, and people like myself who were brand-new to the organization and even the event who had no preconceptions of what South By should be.”
That said, SXSW has always been in a state of flux from the moment it first launched as a four-day music conference back in 1987. Much of what has become familiar about the festival was a later addition: There wasn’t even a convention center until 1993, and the festival didn’t add a film and multimedia component for another year. A majority stake in SXSW was acquired by Penske Media in 2021, and since then the company has seen the firing and departure of many of its most seasoned and knowledgeable staff. There are still some veterans, like Chief Commercial Officer Peter Lewis, who were part of completely reimagining the fest in 2020, turning it from a massive in-person cultural event into a COVID-proof streaming experience. “That was certainly a cold dose of water in the morning,” Lewis said, “[but] it definitely positioned us, from a mindset standpoint, to be focused on how we can improve the event.”
This year marks another massive challenge: The convention center, which has been the festival’s anchor for over three decades, has been demolished and its replacement will not open until 2029 at the earliest. The change has been a long time coming, with various groups annoyed that it took so long and others frustrated that it’s happening at all. Knowing they had to change so many established operational procedures, the task force took the festival back to its basic intentions. First, Cassin said, are “the epic stories. There’s always the story of ‘I was at that South By,’ and it always proceeds to be the craziest thing you ever heard.”
Everyone has those stories. For Cassin, it was watching Elmo perfectly imitate Seth Rogen’s laugh in front of a delighted Rogen. (“You’ve never seen a man cry-laughing like that. He was dying.”) Lewis will never forget bumping into billionaire investor Mark Cuban as he was leaving the bathroom at the convention center. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, that’s Mark Cuban!’ And my second thought was, ‘Wait, don’t people like him have special bathrooms somewhere else?’”
This desire to facilitate these moments of unexpected synergy led to the first big change from the last few years: Moving the festival from 10 days to seven by having all the sections run concurrently. Regular attendees have got used to the first weekend being for Film and Interactive, and the second for Music, with a bit of blur in the intervening week. This year, all three elements – Film and TV, Music, and what’s now dubbed Innovation – will run concurrently. Lewis called the shift the result of conversations about “creating an event that is more manageable, and the reality is that nobody has 10 days to spend in Austin except Austinites.” The hope is that the single calendar will lead to more synergy between industries and allow for what Lewis dubbed “the marketer’s favorite phrase – surprise and delight moments.”
Moreover, while the overall festival shrinks, two of the components are actually expanding as Music actually adds a day, while Innovation grows from four days to a full week. However, the Film and TV Festival loses two days and won’t have a closing night film as the Paramount Theatre will be needed for the film awards that night. Moreover, the weekend yet again clashes with the Oscars ceremony, and many out-of-town industry visitors are planning to miss Saturday and Sunday night in Austin to head to Los Angeles.
The second big change was inspired by that physical loss of the convention center as a hub: designing a new footprint for the festival. While the festival will still use more remote venues like the Alamo South Lamar for film and Hotel Vegas for music, it’s become more concentrated in the 60-block rectangle between I-35 and Congress Avenue, and 10th Street and Cesar Chavez. “We were walking the new footprint over and over,” said Cassin, “and it feels big and overwhelming in all the best ways, but it also feels manageable to the average new person.”
SXSW’s closest partner in all these changes is the city of Austin. Maria Alonso, special events manager for Austin Arts, Culture, Music, & Entertainment, explained that the city is in constant conversation with SXSW on issues like road closures and public safety, and those aspects haven’t really changed. If anything, she said, the shorter timeline and condensed footprint will make the situation “a little more controlled [and] contained Downtown, which for us makes it easier to coordinate.”
Within that concentrated footprint, this year the festival will provide new hangout hubs, nicknamed clubhouses, intended to spur community building but also located near the biggest draws for each badge type. The Innovation clubhouse will be at Brazos Hall, close to most of the sessions in nearby hotels. Music takes over the Downright Austin hotel, at the top end of Red River but still within easy reach of the remaining venues on the Eastside. Film & TV will be anchored at 800 Congress, next to a three-block street closure along Congress and within easy reach of the film-centric panels at the nearby Omni Hotel and Headliner screenings at the historic Paramount Theatre. In part, Lewis explained, this approach was inspired by the spinoff event, SXSW London, which never had a central hub and instead creates spaces across the whole Shoreditch neighborhood. Cassin added, “We hope that people will have a day that actually makes sense.”
With no convention center, many of the events it hosted are being relocated. Take the familiar trade show: Now branded SXSW Expo, it’s moved one block east of the convention center to the Fairmont Hotel. Meanwhile, the Flatstock poster sale has been similarly displaced, and now will take place over on the west side of the construction site, at the Austin Marriott Downtown. To get from one to the other, you’ll walk past where the convention center once was.
On the tourism side, Tiffany Kerr, SVP/CMO for Visit Austin, said that her office was optimistic about all the changes. “Long before the convention center became its primary hub, SXSW thrived in our local music venues, theatres, and hotels,” she said. “2026 is a celebration of that original ‘City as a Venue’ spirit.”
However, SXSW veterans will see some changes beyond the duration and locations. While Platinum badges will get access to everything, the festival has got rid of what was known as secondary access, so there’ll be no getting into a film with a Music badge. Equally, there’ll be no sneaking into a music showcase with an Innovation or Film badge unless you pay for a Music wristband as an add-on. Moreover, the Film pass has completely gone, replaced by limited individual tickets for certain screenings.
That last loss has upset many locals who helped fill screenings of lower-profile films. Yet the SXSW team is aware of the regular complaint that SXSW simply descends on Downtown Austin. Since the festival will, by necessity, be more integrated into the community than ever, they’ve doubled down on outreach with local businesses, as well as published a series of guides for visitors to help point them toward Downtown stores and restaurants. Lewis noted that the festival is “very much part of the framework of the city of Austin, and so we’re thinking through what’s making the most impact for the city and the people.”
The people who will be most immediately affected are Downtown residents and businesses. Jenell Moffett, senior vice president for economic development, marketing, and strategic communications for the Downtown Austin Alliance, stated that there’s great interest among her members about what the new format will mean for them. She called the concentrated timeline “smart” from an operational standpoint and noted that it should mean shorter road closures and disruptions for residents and businesses. However, she added, “On the economic output side, I think it’s hard to tell.”
There’s still a big question about what the shorter time frame will mean for hotel bookings and general spending by guests. And this comes as businesses are already navigating the loss of the convention center, which Moffett called “an anchor asset” for Downtown. “It wouldn’t be fair to say that we don’t notice or feel the pullback.”
And the convention center isn’t the only major construction project that’s hitting Downtown over the next decade. In June of this year, the Paramount – the biggest screen and biggest theatre of the film festival – will close for a 10-month restoration and renovation project. The good news for fest regulars is that the remodel will include new bars, upgraded sound and light, and new seating. As Austin Theatre Alliance Executive Director Jim Ritts put it, “The things we’re fixing here, patrons have been asking us to fix for a long, long time.”
The bad news is that this will mean the Paramount is closed during SXSW 2027. Then when it reopens in April of next year, it will be the turn of the neighboring State Theatre, which will close for 14 months, starting in July 2027 and running through November 2028. Luckily, the Austin Theatre Alliance is confident that it can hit those dates, as they’ve been working with architects and restoration experts for almost two decades on setting this in motion.
There’s a lot less certainty about another construction project that dwarfs even the convention center: the complete rebuilding of the Downtown stretches of I-35. The Texas Department of Transportation has estimated that this will mean seven years of traffic hell on the main arterial route through Austin, but that’s widely regarded as wishful thinking, considering how delayed every other major highway project in Austin has been. At the same time, that 2029 completion date for the convention center could end up being fluid, and it’s unlikely that SXSW will be back in the building before 2030.
Add on to this the broader economic uncertainty. The golden era of tech firms throwing money at events like SXSW for activations is over, but for Lewis that’s one of the advantages of the festival’s broad cultural portfolio. “We can’t control anybody’s budget,” he said, “[but] we are uniquely positioned in that we are bringing together so many different and diverse industries that there’s a little bit of a balance.”
At the same time, the number and diversity of firms and nations represented in the expo has noticeably shrunk over the last few years. That’s one indicator of how many international travelers are avoiding the U.S. as a destination, with both business and tourism travel declining markedly nationwide. This has been caused by a combination of concerns about deportations, increased travel restrictions on many countries, and constant reports of artist visas being denied or delayed, and there is little expectation that this trajectory will shift under the Trump administration. All that the SXSW staff can do is give international visitors as much support and advice as possible. This includes giving advice on planning a visit under the increasingly challenging visa application process.
With all these changes and burdens, the expectation is that 2026 will be a transitional year for SXSW and its attendees. Lewis said, “It’s a different context this year, for sure, but we’re focused on trying to create a platform where they can showcase their talents, meet people, do business.”
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.