The Hype Machine

Had a great chat last week with Eliot Van Buskirk which led to this story at Wired’s Listening Post today:

The Music Fan Behind Hype Machine: Q&A With Anthony Volodkin

Have you ever wanted to search Hype Machine right from your Firefox 2.x browser? You can!

Just click on the Google (or other engine logo) in your search box and pick “Add Hype Machine”!

After that, you’ll be able to select Hype Machine as one of your search engines in that box! This has been available for a few months, but we totally forgot to write about it.

TicketMaster has this great deal with iTunes. You buy tickets, get free iTunes tracks. Excellent.

Having just bought two tickets to a Cat Power show at the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, NY this summer, I realized it’s not that simple.

What’s complicated about getting free tracks?

It’s hard to believe they are, in fact, free.

$22.55 ($8.85 x 2 + $4.85, and assuming TicketMaster gave $2 facility charge straight to the venue, as their KB suggests) of order charges later, I have 2 free iTunes tracks. I get that TM needs its fees, and that it’s better to have 2 tracks than not, but ultimately…

This consumer experience sucks.

The extra charges are not explained anywhere on the site, they are 25% of the whole purchase price, and made me wonder if I just bought two iTunes tracks.

That said, I can’t wait for the show.

Can ticketing ever be friendly and sexy?

London is a tough town. For every single thing that you fall in love with, you also find something that simply shouldn’t happen in cities of this size and affluence.

There is one place that I miss more than the rest of London combined. In my tour of London, a walk around the tourist staples of the city (bridges, pretty old government buildings, etc), would be replaced by a simple evening here. Really.

Cafe 1001 is a dimly-lit lounge with two spacious rooms, couches, great food (including an outside grill with great burgers), eclectic music and events. Odd street-art-style drawings cover the walls along with a strange poem or two. Weekday nights are not too crowded, weekends get busy.

On Monday nights, this all gets even better. In the back room, there is a screening of an eclectic set of short films. Really eclectic, Hype Machine-eclectic. It’s called Short & Sweet. Student films, famous shorts, music videos, strange animated films, you name it. They thrill you, make you think, wonder and feel, all the while you are on comfortable couches, with candles and drinks. Offbeat mix of music follows. Oh yeah, and it’s free.

Short & Sweet and Cafe 1001 brought me my most incredible nights in London. You won’t find it in TimeOut, so you just have to see for yourself.

Where’s this in New York?

The old-school analog Inbox brings:

We are looking for hackers that can’t wait to create a new way to enjoy music on the web. Let’s make this happen.

Write to us if any of these are you:

- You’ve built fast PHP/MySQL/JS/Ajax apps
- You can hack mean & maintainable Perl to do just about anything with XML and other kinds of data.
- You administer dozens of FreeBSD systems and keep them happy

Show us what you are working on, what you’ve built and what you know. You can be anywhere, but if you are in New York, then I can buy you a beer.

Do it!

Wednesday night, I will be on Fair Game - “a satirical news and entertainment, weekday evening program hosted by Faith Salie” on Public Radio International.

Use PRI’s station & show locator to find when and where you can hear this episode on Wednesday.

UPDATE: You can hear the segment here. That was fun!