The Hype Machine

Good articles about music blogs and other new media sites in the press:

A good discussion about new ways to find good music on the Internet at PBS’s MediaShift.

The Washington Time writes about music blogs, why they exist and what they do.

Boston Phoenix has an in-depth look at YouTube and the Hype Machine.

1000th issue of Rolling Stone has a mention of the Hype Machine and podcasting.

Popular Science writes about great ways to discover music “you never knew you liked”.  Esquire and Entertainment Weekly (thanks Scott!) also gave Hype Machine a shout-out.

This year, I attended both days of the Coachella festival, so I had a chance to experience the incredible music it had to offer. We had an amazing time seeing Depeche Mode, Kanye West, Gnarls Barkley, Tool, Massive Attack, Metric and a few others that I forget at the moment. Certainly worth flying across the country for this.

Now that I am back home, it’s also great to see a wealth of coverage produced by the attendees:

Photos at Flickr’s Coachella cluster. Even more photos tagged “coachella”.
Opinions, photos, and discussion on blogs via Technorati, along with MP3 blogs. Largehearted Boy has a good post with links to recordings from the festival. There are many more and given that there were over 60,000 attendees on each day, it makes perfect sense.

The New York Times’ review was also good, but that’s nothing new.

A few neat updates to the pop-up flash player on the Hype Machine. This version is based on wonderful work with the XSPF player by Lacy Morrow.

Now you can:

- Pause
- Seek within a track
- Shuffle
- Repeat the same track over and over
- Go to the relevant iTunes page for each song, if iTunes carries the artist.

In other words, it’s actually useful now.