South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of film, interactive and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring (usually in March) in Austin, Texas, United States. SXSW began in 1987, and has continued to grow in size every year. In 2011, the conference lasted for 10 days, with SXSW Interactive lasting for five, Music for six, and Film running concurrently for nine days.

South by Southwest is run by a company, called SXSW Inc., that plans and executes conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. In addition to the three main South by Southwest festivals, the company runs two other conferences, both also in Austin: SXSWedu, a conference on educational innovation, since 2011; and SXSW Eco, an environmental conference, since 2012.

SXSW Music is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with more than 2,000 performers playing in more than 90 venues^{[citation needed]}. SXSW Music offers artist-provided music and video samples of featured artists at each festival via their official YouTube channel.

David Eric "Dave" Grohl (born January 14, 1969) is an American rock musician, multi-instrumentalist, and singer-songwriter, who is the lead vocalist, guitarist, primary songwriter and founder of the Foo Fighters, prior to which he was the drummer in the grunge band Nirvana. He is also the drummer and co-founder of the rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures. Grohl has additionally written all the music and performed all the instruments for his short-lived side projects Late! and Probot, as well as being involved with Queens of the Stone Age numerous times throughout the past decade. He has performed session work (as a drummer) for a variety of musicians, including Garbage, Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy, Slash, Juliette Lewis, Tenacious D, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Lemmy Kilmister.

As a child, Grohl's family relocated from Warren, Ohio, to Springfield, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Three years later, when Grohl was six, his parents divorced, and Grohl grew up living with his mother.

Adam Whitney Savage (born July 15, 1967) is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters. His model work has appeared in major films, including Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. He is a prominent member of the skeptic community. He lives in San Francisco with his twin sons and wife, Julia.

Born in New York City, Savage was raised in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County New York. He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985. His father, Whitney Lee Savage (1928-1998), was a painter, filmmaker and animator known for his work on Sesame Street, and has a permanent exhibit in the Avampato Discovery Museum. His mother is a psychotherapist. His sister Kate Savage is also an artist. As a teenager in Sleepy Hollow, he routinely visited the local bike shop to have flat tires fixed. The shop showed him how to do the repairs himself. From this experience, Savage said, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard...I've been building and putting bicycles together since then."

Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-born American business magnate, engineer and inventor. He is best known for co-founding SpaceX, Tesla Motors and X.com, which later became Paypal after acquiring the service. He is currently the CEO and Chief Designer of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity. While at those companies, Musk co-designed the first viable electric car of the modern era, the Tesla Roadster, a private successor to the Space Shuttle, Falcon 9/Dragon, and the world's largest Internet payment system, PayPal.

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a Canadian-American mother and a South African father. His maternal grandfather was from Minnesota, and had moved to Saskatchewan, where Musk's mother was born. His father is an engineer and his mother is an author, nutritionist and model, appearing on the cover of New York Magazine in 2011 and a Time Magazine supplement in 2010.

Musk bought his first computer at age 10 and taught himself how to program; by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software for about $500, a space game called Blastar.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (/ˈstɛfəniː dʒʌrməˈnɑːtə/ STE-fə-nee jurr-mə-NAH-tə; born March 28, 1986), known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to focus on her musical career. She began performing in the rock music scene of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and was signed with Streamline Records by the end of 2007. During her employment as a songwriter for the record company, her vocal abilities captured the attention of recording artist Akon, who signed her to his label Kon Live Distribution.

Lady Gaga came to prominence as a recording artist following the release of her debut album The Fame (2008), which was a critical and commercial success that topped charts around the world and included the international number-one singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". After embarking on the The Fame Ball Tour, she followed the album with The Fame Monster (2009), which spawned the worldwide hit singles "Bad Romance", "Telephone" and "Alejandro". The album's success allowed her to embark on the eighteen-month long Monster Ball Tour, which later became one of the highest-grossing concert tours of all time. Her most recent album Born This Way (2011) topped the charts of most major markets and generated more international chart-topping singles, including "Born This Way", "Judas" and "The Edge of Glory". Besides her musical career, she involves herself with humanitarian causes and LGBT activism.