I didn’t walk into Coca-Cola’s Sips & Sounds showcase on Day 2 of SXSW 2026 expecting to be stopped in my tracks. That’s not a knock on the event—it’s just the honest psychology of festival culture, especially in Austin, where the sheer density of talent and noise trains you to move through spaces rather than settle into them. You sample. You drift. You optimize. And then Jade LeMac started playing, and I stopped optimizing.
Jade LeMac is shaping her own ‘Constellation’
There’s a rooted version of SXSW that still believes in discovery: not the algorithmic kind, not the sponsored kind, but the old, inconvenient kind where a stranger’s voice cuts through the ambient noise of a festival afternoon and physically reroutes you. That version showed up on Day 2 of Sips & Sounds. The problem is, it only got 45 minutes.
I watched it happen in real time. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes into her set, people started moving. Not because of a stage announcement or a crowd surge—because something pulled them. Folks who had been drifting between the surrounding pop-ups and pavilions slowed down. People on benches stood up. I heard it directly from the people next to me: who is this?
Not rhetorical. Genuinely wanting to know. Already finding their rhythm before they’d even gotten an answer.
That is extraordinarily difficult to manufacture. Most artists spend years chasing exactly that moment. Jade LeMac generated it in a fraction of a set that was already too short.
She’s a Vancouver-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music is high-energy and emotionally precise; the kind of sound that doesn’t ease you in, it just arrives.
But what struck me wasn’t the production or even the songs themselves. It was her presence. There’s a sophistication to the way she holds a room that you don’t usually associate with an artist at this stage—not because of age, but because of ego, or rather the complete absence of it.
She introduced herself as Canadian. Made a wry, self-aware joke about trading a frozen winter for Austin’s atmospheric extremes. It landed because it was true, and because she was actually paying attention to where she was.
She wasn’t projecting a set piece onto the audience. She was reading the outside venue of Auditorium Shores: the outdoor heat, the Sips & Sounds energy, the curiosity of a crowd that hadn’t yet decided to stay—and she was meeting it with genuine warmth and humor.
That’s the thing that rarely gets named when we talk about stage presence: it’s not charisma deployed at an audience, it’s empathy extended toward one.
Jade LeMac wasn’t performing at Austin. She was showing up for it.6.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify (as of press time). Jade LeMac’s a name that’s been circulating in the right circles, her breakout single “Constellations” now has over 325 million streams worldwide, she’s received a GLAAD Award nomination for Outstanding Breakthrough Music Artist, and she’s shared stages at Lollapalooza and Osheaga.
But Austin hadn’t really met her yet. And that gap between reputation and presence? She closed it in real time.
New sounds deserve more than 45 minutes…
This is where the critique lives, and it needs to be stated plainly.
SXSW has a structural problem with rising artists that the industry talks around rather than about. The festival’s commercial layer—the brand showcases, the day parties, the sponsored stages—increasingly serves the needs of the brands doing the activating, not the artists doing the performing.
Booking decisions get made around logistics, timelines, and activation windows. A 45-minute slot is often less about what an artist deserves and more about what fits between the brand’s other programming obligations.
What I witnessed at Sips & Sounds was a rising artist who earned more than she was given–in real time, in front of people who had just discovered LeMac’s vocal allure and weren’t ready for it to end. That’s not a booking success. That’s a missed opportunity dressed up as one. When a crowd is still arriving to an artist’s set while the clock is winding down, the festival has failed the moment it attempted to create.
This isn’t solely an indictment of Coca-Cola’s showcase: it’s a structural critique of how SXSW and its brand partners have quietly redefined who the festival is actually for. The gating of access isn’t just a press and media issue. It extends to the city’s own locals, who are increasingly priced out of experiences happening in their own backyard. And when you restrict the room, you restrict the artist. A rising talent like Jade LeMac–who came to Austin with nothing to prove and everything to give—deserves an audience that reflects the community she came to connect with, not one curated by wristband tier and sponsor approval.
I’ll note, briefly and without burying the lead: I encountered significant hospitality failures from official SXSW event coordinators around previously artist-manager approved media access.
That experience belongs to a much larger, much longer conversation about what SXSW’s commercialization is doing to the people who make it worth attending in the first place—and I’ll get there. But it doesn’t belong in this piece, which is ultimately about an artist who transcended the system that tried to contain her.
The broader question remains: whose interests are emerging artists actually serving when they accept these slots—and what does the industry owe them in return for the cultural credibility they provide?
What it means to ‘show up’
Jade LeMac came to Austin and gave the room everything she had. She was observant, generous, electric, and completely unbothered by the pressure of performing in a city that didn’t know her name yet. She didn’t take from the moment. She didn’t gate her talent behind spectacle or distance. She just showed up: fully, honestly, and without apology.
Austin locals noticed. And Austin locals won’t forget.
LeMac will return to Austin this summer, June 28 at Germania Insurance Amphitheater at Circuit of the Americas (COTA), supporting Hilary Duff on her lucky me global tour. By then, a few more people in this city will know exactly who LeMac is—many of them because they heard her name for the first time on a hot SXSW afternoon, pulled toward a stage by something they couldn’t quite name yet.
The Sips & Sounds festival gave her 45 minutes. She made them matter. That’s the definition of an artist who knows how to show up. The question worth sitting with is whether the institutions that platform them are doing the same.
My final take? Jade LeMac’s SXSW debut at Coca-Cola’s Sips & Sounds was a masterclass in presence, and another indictment of everything the SXSW has stopped being.
A special thank-you to Karen Moss, Liz Rosenberg Media, and Jade LeMac’s managerial and booking teams for allowing myself and True Hollywood Talk to independently experience Ms. LeMac for the first-time.
