In a twist on the annual South by Southwest event that added a large tech component to its music festival, Amazon Web Services Inc. plans to hold a full-blown music festival at its annual cloud conference in December.

Tweeted quietly late last week from a new Twitter account, the Intersect festival is billed as “a new festival celebrating music, community, and innovation.” The bare-bones site says only that it’s a “new music festival celebrating the intersection of inspiring musicians and storytellers, innovative art, technology, and community.”

Intersect will be held Dec. 6 and 7 in Las Vegas, at the tail end of the Amazon.com Inc. cloud computing unit’s annual re:Invent conference. Amazon hasn’t revealed yet why it’s adding a heavy music component to its decidedly geeky annual cloud conference, let alone what artists will appear there.

And AWS certainly doesn’t need more reason for people to attend its conference. It has become one of the most important tech conferences of the year, where the company and its partners introduce dozens of new services and features. More than 40,000 people attended re:Invent last year.

It’s de rigueur for just about every significant or insignificant tech conference to offer musical entertainment, sometimes even very well-known artists. And with AWS minting money, at least relative to the rest of Amazon, it no doubt can afford to get some top talent, especially in Las Vegas, where many entertainers are already doing shows.

Still, a music festival also may attract more high-profile customers, especially in entertainment, increasingly a focus for Amazon all the way from its Prime Video streaming service to media-oriented cloud services such as its Elemental video processing service.

Amazon and its cloud unit have long demonstrated a keen interest in music. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy is a big music fan, featuring a house band at his annual re:Invent keynote. Moreover, he customarily introduces each of his major points during the keynote with a snippet of a song, such as Queen’s “I Want It All,” the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” last year.

Earlier in his career at Amazon, he wrote the business plan for Amazon’s move into the music business, its first big push beyond its original book business. He was its director of product management and general manager.

Likewise, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels loves techno and modern rock, and among re:Invent regulars, the band T-shirt he sports during his own annual keynote is closely watched.

SiliconANGLE has reached out to AWS to find out more about the conference.

Photo: AWS