Long Beach Podcasts

A Long Beach listening queue changes character quickly. One moment it is a live soul session; the next it is a street-race preview, a piece of local history, or championship-week football. There is no single show offering a broad portrait of the city. The strongest coverage comes from programs that claim one small part of it and stay there.

Live music, hour by hour

Long Beach Soul Collective Live! provides the most sustained run of explicitly Long Beach-focused episodes. Its archive is organized like a sequence of performances rather than a narrated guide, with recordings including The Long Beach Soul Collective Live hour 2 — May 6, 2026, Long Beach Soul Collective hour 1 May 5, 2026, and The Long Beach Soul Collective, Live! April 8, 2026.

That repetition is the attraction. Listeners can move through separate sessions such as The Long Beach Soul Collective, Live! March 11 2026 and The Long Beach Soul Collective, Live! March 4, 2025 hour 1 without needing a larger storyline. Start here when “podcasts about Long Beach” means hearing a recurring local music fixture rather than hearing the city explained.

Two wonderfully specific pieces of history

Don't Know Beach About History: Short Histories of Long Beach takes the opposite approach: compact stories built around a particular episode from the past. Roy Beebe and His Incredible "Cosmic Ray" Machine!: The 1940s Health Scam Guru Who Shook Up Long Beach promises an eccentric scam story with the city at its center. Elvis in Long Beach 1956! offers a much cleaner hook.

The show’s narrowness works in its favor. These are approachable on-ramps for listeners who would rather begin with one strange machine or one famous visit than commit to a chronological history. The Roy Beebe episode is the more curious choice; the Elvis episode is the obvious quick start.

When Long Beach means race week

Sports coverage is led by motorsports, and Speed Street gives the subject its most enthusiastic framing. 207 - Crown Jewel of the Streets - Speed Street Previews Long Beach treats the event as worthy of a dedicated preview. The show’s style is brisk and conversational, comfortable with IndyCar detail, paddock context, technical explanation, and the sort of name-heavy digressions that racing fans tend to enjoy. Casual listeners can follow, but this is happiest in the garage.

Trackside Podcast also previews the action in Curt & Kevin Preview Long Beach, Talk New Street Course Qualifying, and No Herta and Prema for the 500!. The title tells you exactly how the episode moves: Long Beach leads, then the conversation widens into qualifying and Indianapolis 500 matters. Choose it if you like a racing-news rundown with several items on the board. Choose Speed Street when the Long Beach preview itself is the draw.

Local football and one dramatic life story

What Up, Long Beach?! supplies the clearest local-team entry with CIF Football Championship Week With Long Beach Wilson & St. Anthony. It is a sharply bounded episode rather than a general city overview, making it useful for listeners looking specifically for championship-week football involving the two named schools.

Urban Valor: the podcast reaches Long Beach through a single, much heavier narrative: Long Beach Gangster Wanting a Warrior’s Death Survives 55 Months in Combat!. The title promises a dramatic personal account linking Long Beach, gang life, and combat survival. It stands apart from the music, racing, and school-sports episodes: the pick here for anyone drawn to an intense long-form story.

Beyond these programs, Long Beach is mostly a passing reference inside episodes devoted to other subjects. Anyone seeking sustained civic reporting or a wide-angle city guide will find the coverage thin. What is available is more fragmented and more personal: a performance, a historical oddity, a race preview, a football week, one life story.

Where to start

For the strongest sports entry, begin with Speed Street’s 207 - Crown Jewel of the Streets - Speed Street Previews Long Beach. Follow it with Trackside Podcast’s Curt & Kevin Preview Long Beach, Talk New Street Course Qualifying, and No Herta and Prema for the 500! to hear a broader race-week agenda.

For something rooted in local history, try Roy Beebe and His Incredible "Cosmic Ray" Machine!: The 1940s Health Scam Guru Who Shook Up Long Beach from Don't Know Beach About History: Short Histories of Long Beach. If music is the better doorway, Long Beach Soul Collective Live!’s Long Beach Soul Collective hour 1 May 5, 2026 is the natural first hour.

Featured shows below are part of the PlayNext catalog. Updated weekly.