I thought I’d covered this in ResearchBuzz, but apparently I hadn’t, so there’s no time like the present… Podbop, at http://podbop.org/, allows you to search for musical acts playing in your area, and get links to songs by those acts at the same time. The site says it lists over 2700 artists and over 4200 songs.

The front page asks you to specify a city and state. I chose Indianapolis IN. I got a list of bands playing in the area over the next few weeks, including Moe, Nickelback, and Adrian Belew. With each listing (they include time, date, venue, etc and a link to more details at Eventful) there are also links to songs and song samples from that band.

All of the songs I saw were MP3s; I don’t think anything else is indexed. The songs themselves came from everywhere; I saw things from Archive.org, from record label sites, from the artist’s personal site, and from some places I couldn’t identify at all.

You can get the search results as a podcast; look for the giant icon at the top of the results. You can also get the results as an M3U audio playlist. Nice!

There’s a list of artists and songs at http://podbop.org/artists/. Visitors are invited to check the list and add other artists if they’re not already on the site. A great idea, well-executed.