We are looking for a versatile frontend developer to join our small team in New York to help us build fresh music apps on the web. (Those living or willing to move to New York strongly preferred, but you are elsewhere and we fall in love, we may be able to work something out.)
You must have:
Strong PHP/JS (+assorted frameworks)/CSS skills
An eye for design and attention to the details of UX
Familiarity with high performance web techniques, MySQL, MongoDB
A serious appreciation of music and culture
Interested?
Email jobs@hypem.com. Tell us about yourself, what you’ve built, what you find interesting and challenging. What tools do you like? What music websites do you like? How do you discover culture? What would you really want to change about our current product? Send us links to your presence online, resume (if you have one), github code, etc. No attachments!
About The Hype Machine creates engaging experiences with music on the web. Every month, nearly two million people around the world visit The Hype Machine to discover new music. It was founded in 2005 by Anthony Volodkin in New York City. More about us here.
Head over to the Hype Tumblr and join our contest to see who can find the most “girl in headphones” graphics on music sites around the web. Three winners will get a pair of sweet SIEGE STEALTH earbuds, so start your lists!
It’s taken us a week to recover, but we’re finally beginning to feel human again! Thank you to the thousands and thousands of people who made it to our party across the 4 days of SXSW Music. Fifty-six hours of music, over 100 bands+djs, 1000 breakfast tacos, and cases upon cases of Vitamin Water and Heineken later, we’ve definitely left a dent in 6th street.
We’ve thrown a few day or night shows in the past, but this was the largest undertaking we have ever been a part of. A lot of things went right, just a couple of things went wrong, and we learned a whole ton of things. We learned that it is difficult to fill up a 1,500 person capacity during the day, when people are still sleeping off the night before. We learned that events are hard. We learned that it all feels worth it when you’re dancing in the middle of a thousand people at midnight, and everybody’s smiling.
We simply couldn’t have done it without the teamwork of:
Black Box Revue, who invited us to be a part of their Lose Control party this year and brought together an amazing group of people who genuinely care about music. The Windish Agency for helping us out with most of the booking, stage plots and logistics. Beatnik and their team for literally being the backbone that kept the whole party together by providing sound, stage, lighting, and a relentless crew who were in it for the long haul. David Schacher and Beef for providing all kinds of logistical help and being troopers through it all. Emily Moore for the amazing photography. NoMathmatics for the incredible Lose Control art.
And what would a Hype Machine party be without music? Serious thanks to all the bands and management that helped make this happen: 12th Planet, Acrylics, Admiral Radley, Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Auto Body, Baby Monster, Bachelorette, Bang Bang Eche, Baron Von Luxxury, Black Box Revue, Body Language, Casiokids, CFCF, Chiddy Bang, Class Actress, Crystal Fighters, The Crystal Method, Crystal Vision, Dances With White Girls, Database, Delorean, Delta Fiasco, Eclectic Method, Eli Smith, Everything Everything, Fenech-Soler, First Aid Kit, Free Magic, French Horn Rebellion, Grrrl Parts, Grammatics, Hey Champ, Hollywood Holt, Home Video, Hottub, Hussle Club, Javelin, Jen Lasher, Keenhouse, Keepaway, Kids At The Bar, Kill The Noise, Lemonade, LexiconDon, Light Pollution, Lucy and the Popsonics, Male Bonding, Megaphonic Thrift, MeLo-X, Michael Parallax, Mickey Factz, Midnight Conspiracy, MillionYoung, Nice Nice, Nick Catchdubs, Nomathmatics, OK Deejays, Rafter, Royal Bangs, Rural Alberta Advantage, Rye Rye, Samuel, Small Black, Solid Gold, Spleen United, Star Eyes, Steed Lord, Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt, The Death Set, The Hood Internet, The Invisible, The Ruby Suns, Tobacco, Tommie Sunshine, Toro Y Moi, Trash Yourself, Treasure Fingers, Two Fresh, Uffie, VDRK, Villains, Wallpaper, We Are Like The Spider, WhoMadeWho, Woodhands, Yacht, Yes Giantess, You Say Party! We Say Die!, Richard Gear, eLstar, Prepmode, A Ward, Mike Townsend, Kook Hersh, Irresponsible Voltron Crew, Hot Britches, Miguel Angel, DJ Cat NYC, Automatic Panic, Mad Classy Crew.
And our sponsors, Vitamin Water, for keeping everyone hydrated during the day. Heineken, for keeping the bands rockin’. Townie Records, for providing the breakfast tacos each day. SoundCloud for providing the WiFi and HypeCloud player, making it easy for bands to share their music with bloggers. And last but definitely not least, Jakprints for providing the banners and 11,000 RSVP laminates.
Shark? get ready to rock the books off the shelves.
The Morning Benders close out the night with an acoustic set of songs from their new album.
This is a bookstore…
This was a wonderful, happy evening of friends and music, and thanks to everyone who came by and drank a beer, we raised nearly $3000 for Housing Works! Want to organize something cool in your city? Tell us what you’re thinking, and let’s help everyone fall in love with something new.
Come out to our first event of the year in NYC! Enjoy some much-needed Cuddle Magic, check out Shark?, and get excited for the new album from The Morning Benders.
Best of all, bring your used CDs to swap and donate to Housing Works. That’s right, dig into those shoe boxes under your bed, go into your storage cube, and bring out all those CDs you don’t play anymore, but just couldn’t bear to let go. Ramones anthologies, Slanted and Enchanted, P-Funk compilations, everything you’ve got. We’ll all browse the stacks, evaluate our friends’ taste in music, and realize that yeah, I really should own this album. It’ll be like clicking on someone’s Hype Machine profile and picking up recommendations, except these songs come with artwork.
A ticket for 1 free CD is included with your admission. All proceeds from the show, as well as the unswapped CDs, will be donated to Housing Works’s fight to end homelessness and AIDS.
We love the integration of useful, well-made services on the internet. That’s why we let you scrobble to Last.fm, tweet about your new favorite song, and find show dates right in our sidebar.
Well, we’ve been hosting our radio shows with SoundCloud, and bloggers kept asking, “If you love SoundCloud so much, why don’t you aggregate it?” So now…we can!
Tracks that are shared via embedded SoundCloud players will show up on The Hype Machine so bloggers using this great service don’t need to re-host the files elsewhere. The writers have an easier time sharing the music they’re discussing, artists who upload their songs to SoundCloud have an easier time checking their play counts using SoundCloud’s analytics, and everyone has an even better music experience.
Now that all 50 illustrations for the Top 50 artists have been revealed, I thought I would share how we ended up with this gorgeous, inspired gallery of music artwork.
Some of the artists are friends. Some—Khoi Vinh (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart), Mike Perry (Grizzly Bear)—are personal heroes. Hannah Donovan (LCD Soundsystem) masterfully designs our UK bff, Last.fm. The many excellent cartoonists—r stevens (Bloc Party), Jamie McKelvie (La Roux), Dan Meth (Kanye West), Tom Humberstone (Iron & Wine), Julia Scheele (Florence + The Machine), Meredith Gran (The xx)—are a nod to years spent reading webcomics. I met Noah Kalina (The Big Pink) in a Blockles battle, and Josh Gosfield (Bob Dylan) while waiting for Ratatat to go on at The Music Hall of Williamsburg. Yiying Lu (Michael Jackson) made the Twitter fail whale! Deastro’s (Metric) music is frequently discussed on the Hype Machine, but I don’t think that many people knew about his killer collage work (he does his own album art, too).
But most of all, I looked through the wealth of talent being shared on artist communities like Eat, Sleep, Draw, as well as indexhibit and Flickr, and asked artists to recommend friends. The result is a collection of artwork as awesome and diverse as the music in our charts. But I know that everyone has starting doodling something of their own while lost in a song, so share it! Upload it to Flickr, post it on your blog, show us how you interpret your music. Here’s a different take on Vampire Weekend, for starters:
Our annual Music Blog Zeitgeist 2009 is here. All week we will be publishing the Top Artists/Albums/Songs (10 each day) and on Friday you will find out the top 10 of the year!
The Zeitgeist presents an interesting challenge each year: how do we keep taking things to the next level? This year won’t disappoint. Here’s a rundown:
Top 50 Artists: We tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2009 by blogs on The Hype Machine. Then we invited 50 visual artists to create a new piece of artwork inspired by the band’s music and including the band’s name. The results have absolutely blown us away. If you love a piece, click through and let the artist know!
Top 50 Albums: We collected 550 bloggers’ personal top 10 lists and assigned a total score to each of the 1,313 albums (#1=15 points, #2=14, #3=13…) to get a final ranking. We partnered with Grooveshark to power the full album streams and used CC-licensed Flickr Photos of each band as the background. You can also view the full photo behind each album and explore the individual lists that mention an album.
Top Songs Show: We changed things up a bit this year and presented our list of the most favorited songs of each month as a downloadable radio show. Since this generally skews to the dancier side of things, this is a fantastic mix to keep the party going.
This was truly a community effort and wouldn’t have been possible without the musicians who put out such inspiring music, our own users, the 50 visual artists, the 50 photographers, the 550 bloggers, Jeff fromHeart On A Stick (who passed the torch a few years back), David from Largehearted Boy (who does an insane job at collecting best-of lists), Grooveshark (my Gainesville neighbors powering the album streams), Monika Wensel (the artist behind the fabric art on the splash page), SoundCloud (our Berlin friends powering the Radio Show), Adam and Gregory (for the 1-line review inspiration), our Radio Team (Dev, Abbey, Dan) and of course the rest of our awesome team @ The Hype Machine (Anthony, Zoya, Arkadiy, Scott).
December is always one of my favorite months here at The Hype Machine! Not only do I get all giddy about all the Christmas music that flows through the site but I get to work on one of the most fun projects of the year — the Music Blog Zeitgeist!
To make it the best that it can be, we need your lists. If you are a blogger (even if you’re not listed on The Hype Machine), and have made a Top 10 Albums of 2009 list, head over here and submit a link. Even if you don’t blog, or haven’t made a list, you can still suggest an awesome best-of album list you’ve read.
We’re planning on launching on January 4th, with a special treat dropped on New Year’s Eve to get the party started. Have a great holiday with family, friends and good music!
Hey, what’d you get with your $3 credit at the Amazon MP3 store this week? We’ve been sharing the promotion on our site, so we wanted to share what we did with it, too.
Anthony: Earlimart—Happy Alone Caribou—Melody Day (Four Tet Remix) Regina Spektor—Laughing With
Zoya Bob Dylan—I Want You Televison—Marquee Moon
Ringtone: Mario Pipe Warp!
Scott:
unconfirmed, but most likely Lady GaGa
Radio Dev: Keenhouse—The Rendez-vous London Elektricity—Just One Second Andy Lewis & Paul Weller—Are You Trying To Be Lonely?
Sadly, the Hype Machinists currently traveling outside the US could only see this:
If you are in the United States, tell us what songs you got! Guilty pleasures? Remixes? Or just credit toward a full album?
Music Hack Day Boston was the best music tech event I’ve recently attended. The first one was held in London this summer and was organized by Dave Haynes. The idea is simple: get a lot of techies that love music in a room and create a space where they can experiment with each other’s API and tools. Then show off the results and inspire.
The organizers of the Boston event, Dave Haynes, Jon Pierce and Paul Lamere, thought out everything and executed it diligently with a ton of integrity. This is what happens when people genuinely set out to make an event where the right people gather, participate, and just feel comfortable. Thanks guys!
So, what was awesome about Music Hack Day Boston?
1. The space. Microsoft may be evil but they sure know how to support a variety of smaller non-evil tech communities in Boston. The Microsoft New England Research & Development (it spells NERD, you see) Center is a large space on the edge of the MIT campus that has a bunch of meeting rooms of various sizes, quiet corners and a ton of power outlets and seating. Most of the space is set up in an open way, making it easy for new people to join a group hacking or talking, but leaving enough space between the groups so as to not get too crowded. My understanding is that this is just one in a series of different social tech events that MS has allowed to use this space. Very cool.
2. The Internet worked. Sure, it lagged at times, but serious credit is due to any wireless network that survives a few hundred savvy tech people with laptops. I can count the number of conferences I’ve attended that had functional connectivity, at all, on one hand.
3. There were just three panels. This removed the pressure from the organizers to fill panels with important-sounding people and wasted no time. It also made each panel more of an event, which made everyone participate more. Suddenly, the panels were also worth attending.
4. More specific to the panel I was on: our moderator, Chris Dahlen, a writer for Pitchfork, the Onion (& more) was a total badass. He was flawlessly prepared, asked good questions and created excellent, effortless conversation flow. Then, that conversation set up a good base that let the audience ask interesting questions. This was one my favorite panels to have been on in a long time.
5. It was actually a hack day (as a follow up to #3). Most of the time was allocated to workshops where anyone willing was able to show off their API and tools. This even allowed sponsors to participate in the event in a cool way – Yahoo was one of the event sponsors, and so Ben Ward talked about YQL/Yahoo Developer Network/etc. Same for the Echonest, and hey, their API are from the future, anyway.
Perfect fit.
There was also space and equipment for hardware hacking (circuit bending) and learning. I didn’t play there much, but the chirping, strange sounds and frequent ‘whoa’s from the hardware table spoke for themselves. Jimmie Rodgers was patient and generous in showing how to tinker with these noisy circuits.
6. Tons of opportunities to hang out with great people. The genuine nature of the event gathered a great group of people that actually create and build things on the web: developers from a representative set of innovative music/web companies, as well as those who tinker and experiment with music and tech outside of the confines of the browser. They were all easy to find on the event floor. Some of them weren’t hacking, and thus talking. I was planning on building something, but totally got distracted by the people. Dave, Jon and Paul deserve a ton of credit for making an environment where this was possible.
7. No goodie bags. There was a table with stickers, pins and t-shirts. That’s cool and all you ever really need. People empty out goodie bags and keep the totes for grocery shopping, if at all.
8. The event was free. This is often a moot point for many events anyway as a lot of people are invited and get in free, and thus limited revenue comes from tickets. The fact that the organizers were able to get the event sponsored well and placed in a donated space allowed it to be the most open event possible and added to the community vibe.
Oh yeah, and since this was a hack day, it ended with quick 3 minute demos of the hacks! I had to catch a bus out of Boston before all the demos were done, but among the hacks:
When John Seroff of The Tofuhut and Sean Michaels of Said the Gramophone lamented the uniformity of music blogs in the Music Blogger Roundtable discussion, we knew we could find some to restore their faith.
More on this later, but these two sets of interviews offer a unique perspective into where music blogs were and where they’ve arrived today, without marketing speak or hidden agendas.
The Miracle in July is a modern love story told in the most modern way possible: via a vibrant set of photos, music and maps all published via an elegant WordPress installation.
The author, Michelle Anderson, explains:
“Videos, images and music created specifically for this story will be embedded to help submerge the reader into the experience of falling in love online. New interactive elements will be added as I discover them. With sound, words, images and hyperlinks, this digital story is an experiment in interactive sculpting, using tools available to anyone with a connection to the Internet.”
There is much more to say about this, but it’s better to just dive in!
Our annual 
Anthony Volodkin
Taylor McKnight
Zoya Feldman
Scott Kidder
Arkadiy Kukarkin