South-by-Southwest is the ultimate media festival, aimed towards helping all types of artists reach their goals, giving them the medium and venue to do so.

SXSW is best known for the merging of film, technology, music and the arts over a roughly two-week span, taking over downtown Austin and holding events all over the county, with celebrities and musicians rubbing elbows with locals, tourists, and up-and-coming artists.

What other festival has within itself four festivals: music, film, interactive and comedy? Plus, several conferences ranging from style and design to journalism, sports and even politics? None. SXSW is known all over the world for its uniqueness and endless creative opportunity.

While SXSW does present many mainstream artists, and often well known political figures like Michelle Obama and Joe Biden, they also do not forget about the underdogs. You end up with a quirky mix of already famous celebrities alongside up-and-coming artists. There’s opportunity for everyone.

Face-to-face communication is something that seems to become less existent as time goes on. Festivals and other gatherings are important to continue to encourage this communication and to bring different types of people together. SXSW successfully does this by bringing together a massively diverse group of individuals.

SXSW ends up also being a networking hub. By bringing this large variety of people together, connections are made and careers are launched. For many of the artists, this is one of the main reasons for returning to the festival every year: meaningful connections.

The festival is massive, spreading all across the city of Austin. There is always something going on, and there is always something for everyone, no matter what suits your fancy. Growing up here, SXSW has always been an exciting time of year. It is 10 straight days of madness, creativity, good vibes, and appalling out-of-towner traffic.

However great those 10 days may be though, I think all Austinites can agree that they’re happy for it to be over. According to the company running it, SXSW brings something like 70,000 people to Austin just for registered events, much less the free ones, on top of the two million people who already live here. So, yes it is a very crowded week and a half. But it’s a crowd full of people having a good time.