Tomorrow at midnight is the deadline to submit your application for you and/or your awesome LA band to play at the 2010 South By South West conference/festival/music-biz-clusterfuck.

Yeah, we know. Part of the reason you got into music was because you don't like bureaucracy and filling forms, but SXSW is not the Smogcutter and in order to play there you gotta pay $40 and sign up for some kind of complicated music biz subscription thingie called “Sonicbids.”

If you don't wanna do it, ask your less-talented buddy to do it for you and tell him he can call himself your “SXSW road manager” or something like that. If he complains, tell him some dude who started doing boring errands for the Beatles ended up running their not-insignificant business as the president of Apple Corps for decades (think we're bullshitting you? Google “Neil Aspinall”)!

(advice by SXSW insiders on how to be picked, after the jump)

Audio interview with Brad First from SXSW's selection committee giving advice to bands.

Blog post sharing tips/advice from SXSW's chief music director.

UPDATE (11/06):

Adam from Sonicbids wrote to us to clarify his earlier release and explain this Sonicbids business:

” Sid Vicious may not have been big on paperwork, but you bet his label was! It's kind of the double-edged sword of the post-label world…bands now have complete control over everything they do, but they've inherited all the responsibility of running the business side with it.

Sorry I didn't give you a better explanation of how Sonicbids works. Think of it like a monster.com. Promoters like SXSW post jobs, and bands apply to them using an electronic resume they build on the site. (Kind of like college applications, too, where you fill it out once electronically, and send it off to whatever colleges you want.) For bands, it makes life easy, keeps them in the loop about what opps are coming, and saves their time from having to send a different thing to every festival, conference, etc. they want to apply to. For promoters, it gives them everything they'd want to know about the bands they're thinking about hiring in one streamlined, uncluttered format.”

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