Be the first on the bandwagon.

Usually by the time you've heard of a new band or artist they've already at least been signed to an independent label and toured around your region at least once. That virtually guarantees that you're barely one of their first twenty fans in your state. How to preempt that threat to your cred?

Well, the BBC and Norwegian state radio (NRK) each have a weekly radio show, both now available on podcast, featuring one or more unsigned local recording artists. The BBC show, "Radio 1's Best of Unsigned" (XML,iTunes) is a half-hour with one track each chosen by four presenters and a fifth track chosen by listener feedback. This means that no matter who you are you are guaranteed to be bored out of your mind for no less than ten minutes of every show, but the other less-than-twenty are mostly worth it. One of the presenters, Ras Kwame, also has his own genre-specific unsigned podcast, "100% Homegrown" (XML,iTunes), devoted to UK hip-hop, soul, R&B, and suchlike.

NRK2's "Ukas Urørt" ("The Week's Unsigned") (RSS,iTunes) is an approximately 10-minute podcast featuring a single group; they get an interview and one track. In the unlikely case that you don't understand Norwegian, just hop ahead until you hear the music. The website itself has a massive database of unsigned Norwegian groups. The podcast itself updates fairly sporadically for what I assume are technical reasons. but in general it's worth a listen.

There are more unsigned music podcasts out there, like Ian Foulds' "Unsigned Rock Podcast" (RSS,iTunes), a decent UK rock show, but for the most part the state radio shows seem to have the best music on a consistent basis, probably because as the largest entities in their particular countries they get the most entries to cherry-pick each week.

A NOTE: I discovered a fun little protocol while writing this post. If you want to avoid having to display the long-ass, technically-worthless-to-your-web-browser podcast RSS/XML feed URL as plain text, which eats up space and actually broke the tables on my blog, and you know that having the http protocol there will only tempt people to try to use the thing as a link (which I did anyway, sue me) now there's itpc! The itpc protocol will automatically subscribe at the very least iTunes to the linked podcast when clicked. Supposedly it works in IE and Firefox; I don't know if it will subscribe other podcasting/mp3 programs besides iTunes. Find out and tell me.