After a 13-and-a-half-hour drive back to KC and our first good night’s sleep in a week, we men of Locker Partner are ready to take a look back at the week that was. That is, the parts that we haven’t blogged about here already.

Tommie Sunshine at the Alternative Press party on Thursday.

Sadly, we did not get to see a lot of actual live music during the Music portion of SXSW. Sounds crazy, huh? The good news is that we did get a lot of great face time networking day and night with music industry pros to talk about our partner startup, RockDex, the social media aggregation and analytics tool for the music industry.

Spreading the gospel of RockDex was more or less our overall mission at SXSW. Our feeling: RockDex is going to be huge this year.

But we did miss out on quite a bit of general noise, so if you’re here looking for a roundup of festival highlights, we’ll have to direct you to other sources.

First off, our friend Scott Perry of the excellent New Music Tipsheet gives a great comparison of the Music vs. Interactive portions of SXSW. Like us, he attended both. He found that the quality of the Interactive panels tended to tower over those of Music. From his SXSW re-cap:

Interactive may very well pass Music attendance this year, we’ll see when SXSW issues their final numbers. Every single conference room of the convention center and the surrounding hotels were booked with panels for Interactive, and almost all of them were packed solid with people brimming with the same enthusiasm for technology that you and I feel for music. And although these people may be on the bleeding edge of platforms that may or may not take hold in the real world, the ideas exchanged and the connections made will bear fruit with some serious changes in how we all interact.

Scott goes on to talk about how the advent of location-based social networking platforms (plus geolocation features that are popping up in Twitter and Facebook) will further reduce the gap between digital media and the actual experience of life, and even enhance the latter:

Case in point? Geo-location is real. Whether it takes hold via Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook, or some other platform remains to be seen. But when you want to know where the next cool thing is happening just by checking out trending spots or friends’ updates, your life just got a little better. And when that room full of strangers suddenly comes to life with the profiles and backgrounds of the 400 people that just checked into the Driskill at 12:15 on a Friday night (flashmob, sucked), opportunities are to be had — IF you know how to use the right tools. For all the ways we all interact in the world today, we should all be suffering from information overload — but if you know how to properly channel this information into a solid community for your brand (band, club, store, station, etc.), then we ALL win.

Well said, Mr. Perry.

What else went down? More after the jump…

@meltdown

One big chunk of Interactive buzz was dedicated to bashing the keynote panel, conducted by business strategiest Umair Haque with Twitter founder Evan Williams. It did not go well.

As Wired’s Elliott Van Buskirk explains, the derailing of a live interview before today’s Twitter-savvy audiences causes the “otherwise-respected interlocutors to be pelted by virtual tomatoes and beer cans on the real-time short-messaging network.”

The complaint: During the interview, the news of Twitter’s @anywhere feature was broken in the first five minutes, after which Haque steered the conversation in apparently boring directions. People started leaving and tweeting angrily.

TechCrunch shows some choice tweets. Haque apologizes and explains.

Saying Goodbye

On Wednesday, the news of Big Star frontman Alex Chilton’s death from a heart attack at 59 rippled quickly through SXSW. The band was scheduled to play Saturday night at Antone’s. Festival attendees who managed to miss the sad news on Twitter, Facebook or via texts from friends that night surely saw it on the cover of the Austin Chronicle the next morning.

Brooklyn Vegan posted excellent coverage of Saturday night’s Big Star gig, at which luminaries including M. Ward, Mike Mills of R.E.M., John Doe, Evan Dando and Sondre Lerche joined the remaining members of the band in celebrating Chilton’s life and legacy.

Aside from those two highlights and approximately 5,719 others, that’s pretty much all @she wrote.

If you were watching from home, was there any news from SX that struck you? And if you attended, what did you see that was awesome and/or sucky? Share it all in the comments, baby.

Me, I’m going back to bed.

Our heartiest congrats to our partner and friend, Jimmy Winter of RockDex, who did us all proud by winning the first ever East-2-West New Venture Competition. Woo!

Spearheaded by the Invest Nebraska Corporation and sponsored by the Nebraska Department of Economic Development, among other organizations, the contest highlighted Nebraska-based entrepreneurs.

This past Friday at Omaha’s Haymarket, Jimmy and six other finalists pitched their business plans before a panel of judges in hopes of winning the $50,000 equity investment prize.

And though the competition was fierce, our boy Jimmy came out victorious. (Check out the Lincoln Journal Star’s report.)

Our ever-supportive friends at Silicon Prairie News were kind enough to post a photo and a couple of videos from the event.

2010 is so gonna rock.

Written by founding Gang of Four bassist and digital music marketing guru Dave Allen the magnificent essay “Dear Musicians — Please Be Brilliant or Get Out of the Way” has been making the rounds online since it first appeared on Pampelmoose and Fight earlier this month.

Its dominance in the music-blog landscape is easy to understand. Allen has written nothing less than a manifesto of music’s future.

Aimed mainly but not exclusively at independent musicians, Allen’s thesis is that artists must stop relying on traditional means of making and selling product (i.e., CD releases) and focus more on monetizing “the experiential awareness that surrounds their brand.” He writes:

Creating music is only the first step to creating something valuable and timeless. For instance, David Byrne played a building. Music released as part of an event is the future – Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows was the first step toward the album release as event, if it’s an album at all. How it’s done is also important. The container has changed forever. Remember what Rishad Tobaccowala has to say to advertising agencies trying to embrace the social web – “The future does not fit in the containers of the past.” It is no different for bands. The organizing principle of recorded music is now in the hands of musicians, not technologists, not record labels.

Who are some creators of valuable and timeless content, as Allen so often puts it?

To name a few: Dirty Projectors for their “Stillness Is the Move” video, Karin Dreijer Andersson for her work as Fever Ray, Sunn 0))) for its earth-moving live show.

Now that musicians have the ability to get their content — notice how we’re using that word instead of just plain “music” — directly to consumers via digital means, musicians shouldn’t wait for labels, publicists, bookers or anyone else besides the fans to tell them what to do.

The brusque note in the essay’s title is no joke.

With the exception of iconic media experimenters such as David Bowie and the late Michael Jackson, most musicians just want to play: write songs, put out records, play shows.

And that’s all well and good, but those who want to make a living at it and really see their name in lights (oh, how that concept has changed), have got to think outside the metronome.

And if not, well, they’ll get pushed aside by people who are both innovative in the way they create their art (the examples above) and progressive in the way they market it.

Here at Locker Partner, we can’t tell you musicians of the world what to do in terms of being the next Beck or Patti Smith, but we can point you toward effective use of social media and equip you with tools such as our proprietary RockDex platform.

The rest is up to you.

That’s how Britain’s Times Online Labs blog describes the chart below, posted in an entry titled “Do artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?” And if you’re a recording artist looking for a record deal, then, yeah, the big label fat cats probably don’t want you to see this.

The chart shows revenue from live performances, record sales and broadcast royalties collected through PRS (kind of like our BMI and ASCAP). It also shows revenues that go straight to the artist versus to the labels and concert promoters.

The big thing to notice is that while revenue to labels for recorded music plummets (the red line), revenue to artists for live music rises (um, medium-hued blue). As the Labs blogger puts it:

The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.

At the same time, direct-to-artist record sales are dropping, while royalties are rising. This seems to back up the argument for artists not only bypassing labels when putting out music but not even expecting to make money off album sales. It’s the label-as-flier-for-the-tour model in action. Get your music out there however you can — giving it away for free, letting fans pick the price point, whatever — and watch as your live draw increases. In the meantime, be sure to register your music with SoundExchange and own the publishing rights so you can make money when Pandora plays your latest jam or if it gets picked up by Gossip Girl.

Indeed, the “Have a Cigar” days are over. And the good news is you’ll be able to buy your own stogie.

In the meantime, it’s also important to be managing and tracking your social media web buzz, and it just so happens we’ve got a tool for that.

The accolades continue to build for our affiliate, RockDex. The online tool that lets bands locate and measure their social media strides recently made it into music marketing guru Ariel Hyatt’s guide to making it as an indie band: the Indie Maximum Exposure List.

Read a detailed summary and download Ariel’s list at the RockDex blog.

On a recent edition of ABC News Now’s What’s the Buzz, Howard Han and Deborah Schwartz of GigMaven gave our partner company RockDex a sweet shoutout.

GigMaven is an awesome online tool that facilitates the booking process for musicians, promoters and venue owners by providing a place to network and organize data. Deborah explains that GigMaven uses RockDex to help venues find “better bands” by giving them “a way to access metrics from trusted industry sources.”

Heck yes! Thanks, Deborah and Howard.

Watch the five-minute interview here.