Roadtrip App Plays Artists From the Towns You’re Driving Through

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

Road trip season is upon us, as college kids and working stiffs who wish they still had the summer off gas up their tanks and hit the highway. As such, it’s a convenient time for you to find out about Roadtrip Mixtape, an intriguing web app that lets you input any two cities in the world, then maps your route.

What makes it special is that it suggests songs recorded by artists from each town along the way — five songs for every fifteen-minute leg of the trip. Roadtrip Mixtape is a web app, so you can play around with it in the comfort of your own home. It’s powered by Rdio — part of the company’s initiative to become a popular app platform, the way Spotify is. That means that unless you’re an Rdio subscriber, you’ll only get 30 second samples, but that’s enough to take a virtual tour, and you can always get the songs elsewhere (more on that below).

To create a playlist or browse the songs, simply roll over the locations with your mouse. It’s quite self explanatory, but if you get confused, there’s a helpful FAQ.

Created by Paul Lamere — the first man to be inducted into the Music Hack Day Hall of Fame, winner of the MTV O Award for Bohemian Rhapsichord, and director of developer community at The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm, which provides the data for this app about where these artists are from – Roadtrip Mixtape is free to use. (Speaking of the MTV O Awards, I sadly did not win in the NILF category; instead the award went to Twitter’s head of music.)

For now, ironically, Roadtrip Mixtape is perhaps best enjoyed at home on virtual tours around the world, because it doesn’t spit out Rdio playlists that subscribers can take with them, although that feature is in the works.

That said, you can use it today to make road trip mixtapes if you don’t mind tracking down the songs from somewhere else — which actually might be a good idea anyway, because you’ll probably want to pick and choose songs based on whether you like them or not in addition to where the person who made that came from.

Have some fun. It’s Friday. Where are you driving or biking this weekend?