Not every band or musician plays Antone's or Stubb's BBQ when they come to South By Southwest. Luckily, there's hundreds of stages of all different shapes, sizes and settings during the festival in Austin.

And you never know what you might hear when you elbow your way in to listen. During a few hours Friday night at the Midcoast Takeover, a showcase of more than 30 bands from the Kansas City area, an impressive array of musical styles was on display.

There was energetic pop band Antennas Up, hard rockers The Beautiful Bodies and The Hearts of Darkness – think Parliament-Funkadelic with an afro-Cuban vibe. Behind the bands, a 10-foot LED display sprouted light effects.

As South By Southwest has grown, more businesses have opened their doors to provide places to showcase bands. Shangri-La, an indoor-outdoor bar on Sixth Street about a mile from the Austin Convention Center, is hosting the two-day Midcoast Takeover.

Performances start Saturday at noon and run through midnight -- each band gets 30 minutes onstage -- and can be watched live on Ustream. This is the third year for the event, sponsored by the Midwest Music Foundation.

Free to the public, the Takeover on Friday night had a long line of attendees waiting to come into Shangri-La. Once inside, most music fans bypassed the indoor area -- with big-screen TV showing March Madness, jukebox and Ms. Pac-Man machine -- for the upstairs patio, packed with about 200 people.

"It's nice that South By has grown but there is still room for this sort of activity to continue the promotion of new artists like they did back in the day," says Vi Tran whose group, The Vi Tran Band plays at the showcase today.

"To play on a stage like South By Southwest is a wonderful opportunity. At the same time, it is such a large stage and there is so much going on, we approach this with realistic expectations. For us, it's almost more about being ambassadors for Kansas City and validation by your peers," says Tran, whose band, like the others, submitted to a selection process. "That means the world to us. We were thrilled."

The musicians involved in the event, Tran says, consider it "really important for us, as a community, to show what is happening in the Midwest musically."