RoadTrip Mixtape Builds the Perfect Road Trip Playlist

Planning a road trip this summer? RoadTrip Mixtape is a new webapp from The Echo Nest that takes your start and end points, gets driving directions from Google Maps, and then creates a playlist for each leg of your trip made entirely of musicians and bands who got their start in the cities you'll be driving through. RoadTrip Mixtape is a lot of fun to use, and if you're always interested in discovering new music (some of which may even be in your backyard), it's worth a look. When I plotted directions from my place in Washington DC to visit my family in Pennsylvania, I started out with DC musicians like Fugazi, Chuck Brown, and Thievery Corporation, tuned in to The Awesomes and some Oddzar—both from my old stomping grounds in central Maryland, and grooved to a little OHO on my way north into Pennsylvania. The service uses Rdio to select music and build the playlists, and it matches up the duration of each playlist with the leg of your journey. The only serious downside to the service is that it doesn't let you export your mixtape or save it so you can take it with you in the car. Even so, you can click each leg on the Google Map to see which artists are in that leg, and skip forward through the legs of your trip to build your own playlist in whichever service you choose based on the songs RoadTrip Mixtape selects for you. The developers behind the webapp say that a mobile version, and support for more services in addition to Rdio, are on the way soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, it's a great way to choose some local music to listen to for your next trip, or just discover musicians who got their start in your area.