When he's not commandeering the stage as the boisterous bassist for SoCal punks Blink-182, Tweeting wisdom to more than 1.4 million followers, or handling album production duties for bands like Motion City Soundtrack and New Found Glory, you'd think Mark Hoppus would turn down the music.

Not. Possible.

He dishes out celebrity gossip. He doodles penises with abandon. He gets black eyes from Black Eyed Peas. Few web surfers can avoid coming across the ubiquitous Perez Hilton, and now the self-described "Queen of All Media" unveils another identity: tour promoter.

The South by Southwest Music Conference is set for March 18-22 in Austin, TX -- and online music store Lala has asked SPIN.com to point out a few of the bands on our radar for this year's fest!

She may be a bottle blonde with a taut midriff, but Pip Brown is sick of getting pegged as a would-be Britney. "People assume when they see me live for the first time that my drummer wrote all the music," says Brown, a.k.a. Ladyhawke. "If it was a guy standing up there with a guitar singing, nobody would assume he wasn't the writer."

What? New Zealand-born popstress Ladyhawke is revamping the synth-driven '80s sound of Cyndi Lauper and Pat Benatar with sharper beats and guitars, glossier production, and new millennial stomp and sass.