The Hype Machine

Nick Hornby (the writer of High Fidelity) has much to say about music blogs today in the Guardian Observer:

“But it’s easy. Look at Hype Machine (hypem.com) to begin with: in the top right-hand corner of the site, you’ll see a list of the top five most-blogged artists, so you will get a sense of what’s going on out there (or in there, if you are a literal-minded soul).

…

And some of these post songs from new bands, and some post scratched old vinyl funk records, and if you spend an hour messing about you’ll find 20 or 30 great songs you never knew before. In other words: there’s no excuse.…

But more importantly, you need never again feel as though the pop life is drifting away from you – indeed, the anonymity and user-friendliness of the MP3 blogs mean that one feels emboldened to walk into even the scariest-looking website in the full confidence that nobody will laugh at you.”

He has a new book coming out, Juliet, Naked, which is “in part about how a middle-aged man devotes a large chunk of his life to keeping alive the work of a long-forgotten 80s singer-songwriter; he runs a messageboard, posts essays online, and virtually lives in a virtual world, talking to people he wouldn’t ever have met 10 years ago.”

Read the full article here.