AUSTIN, Texas -- The cancellation of South by Southwest (SXSW) 2020 due to fears concerning the spread of coronavirus was national news, and that’s no surprise.

• SXSW 2020 canceled due to coronavirus fears 
• Started with just 700 attendees 
• Plans still in place for SXSW 2021

What started as almost an underground festival has blossomed into Austin’s premiere event, and an international draw. So it’s no wonder its cancellation underlined the seriousness with which the country is taking coronavirus.

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Spectrum News recently caught up with Roland Swenson, the co-founder and CEO of SXSW. Swenson recalled the festival’s humble beginnings and how it blossomed into the event it is now.

Swenson oversees more than a hundred employees in charge of running one of, if not the biggest music and media conferences in the world. SXSW - the event that draws musicians, politicians, movie stars and top executives from around the world - didn’t always look like the event it is today.

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“We decided if we could get like 150 people we’d be okay and then we ended up with 700, so we were more than okay,” said Swenson. “Immediately we started work on the second one, and at that one we got 1,200 people the next year, and 1,800 the year after that and then it just kept growing.”

The idea for SXSW came from the New York City-based “New Music Seminar,” an event that brought musicians and music industry executives together to talk music and network. It’s an event Swenson said he benefited from when he was in the music business, able to finally meet a club booker he had been trying to land a show with. A chance encounter with that person in an elevator would turn into a $200 gig.

“I immediately began thinking about how good this would be for the musicians and music scene in Austin - if there was a lot of record industry people, club bookers, all the others that came down here and saw what was going on,” said Swenson.

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“At the time I was working with the Austin Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and a group of people from the music business. We tried to get them to come down here and hold a version of that event. Initially they said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, yeah, we’ll do that,’ and then they announced it, and then a couple months later they backed out.”

Swenson decided he didn’t need the New Music Seminar team – he believed Austin could do it on its own. He brought his idea to two of his friends at the Austin Chronicle, Louis Black and Nick Barbaro. The group met behind closed doors for weeks, brainstorming how it would all work.

“We didn’t really know if we were going to do it, and we didn’t want everybody to hear about it and then we decided meh, that’s not going to work - and then have everybody go, ‘Hey. what happened?” Swenson said. “So we decided, let’s just keep this amongst ourselves for now, and that turned out to be a good idea.”

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That was back in October 1986; the first SXSW was held just months later in March of 1987. The name for the event was a take on the title of the famous Alfred Hitchcock film, North by Northwest.

While the event has called the Austin Convention Center home since 1993, the first SXSW was held in the ballroom of what was then the Austin Marriott, which is now the Sheraton Austin Hotel at the Capitol. As the event grew, but before construction of the Austin Convention Center was completed in 1992, SXSW was held in multiple downtown Austin hotel ballrooms.

The focus has always been on the music, but Swenson said the turning point for the event came in 1994 when the conference began to truly expand and embrace this growing thing called computers and the internet.

"We had Johnny Cash as the keynote,” said Swenson. “That was the first time we’d ever had someone who had sold 50 million records come and speak. And it was also the same year we started the film festival and the interactive festival.”

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Since the festival’s premier, attendance for SXSW has blossomed from just 700 attendees to more than 400,000.

“I remember having an argument with the local music critic for the Statesman who said it would be impossible for South-by to be bigger than 5,000 people,” recalled Swenson.

Swenson always believed the event would be successful, but even he couldn’t have imagined what it would become more than three decades later.

“No fax machine, no email, no World Wide Web - it would be pretty impossible to have guessed how things would turn out,” said Swenson.

No one, including Swenson, would have guessed the 34^th annual SXSW conference would end up being canceled. Event organizers first said the show would go on despite growing fears over the spread of COVID-19, but Austin health officials and city leaders would have the final say.

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Sunday, Swenson told the Wall Street Journal that SXSW is working to go on as planned next year, “but how we’re going to do that I’m not entirely sure.” Swenson was forced to lay off a third of his full-time staff at SXSW, about 50 people, in the wake of the event’s 2020 cancellation. ​