We’re really excited to release the 2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist today! It was a lot of work, but it was fun and provides a really interesting overview of the year-in-music through the eyes of bloggers. We hope that you can use it to discover some music you may have missed or overlooked last year.
It’s broken up into 3 features:
The Best 50 Songs: We looked at popularity data broken down by month of what people were clicking and playing the most of. Then we selected the most interesting and unique tracks to represent each month. What you get is a pretty varied overview of the year in singles.
The Best 50 Albums: We collected over 600 top 10 album lists to come up with the best overview of what albums really made an impact this year. We weighted them according to their position using the method Jeff used in last year’s Bloggregate. Using that scoring ( #1=15 points, 2=14, 3=13, 4=12, 5=11, 6=9, 7=8, 8=7, 9=6, 10=5) we ended up with over 1200 albums ranked by popularity. And you can explore them all! Click on the “mentions” link on the album cover to see each individual list mention. Finally, you can download the data used to prepare this list here: raw data, compiled data. This data is distributed under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
The Best 50 Bands: According to how many times their music was posted by the music blogs we index, these are the bands and musicians who really got bloggers excited.
As always, let us know what you think! This is a feature we look forward to continuing annually.
A special shout-out to Jeff from Heart On A Stick for passing the Bloggregate torch to us, and for all his awesome help! Also to Kaela, Michael, and Thomas for coming to our Gainesville album listing party, Eugene, Alex and Evan for helping over the Internets and Blockles breaks for keeping us sane and happy!
Very cool! The albums post will be interesting to go through.
January 28, 2008 1:47 pm
Can you keep a feature like this active and rolling? It would be very interesting to be able to just pull up a playlist of the most popular songs of the past 12 months, instead of the 2007 calender year. Same goes for bands & albums.
You have the popular tab, but that’s not really quite the same – that just shows what’s popular now.
Keep the zeitgeist around!
January 28, 2008 3:05 pm
Great job guys. This is a really interesting & helpful alternative to the other top 10 lists out there. I love the design too. Like Derek said, it would be great to eventually see this as a permanent feature, though I realize that might take significant work to automate. Thanks again.
January 28, 2008 4:36 pm
I’d like to see an RSS feed of the daily/weekly list of the same categories. I currently subscribe to the latest track feed and that’s bombarding my feed inbox.
January 28, 2008 10:07 pm
[…] in three sections: The Best 50 Songs, The Best 50 Albums and The Best 50 Bands. It was compiled by extensive analysis of the data they collected from music blogs around the internet throughout […]
January 29, 2008 4:29 am
Good stuff guys, I like the ranking system.
January 29, 2008 11:10 am
Many thanks for continuing the interesting/representative Bloggerate methodology.
But ::shock:: HypeM resides in Gainesville…FL?
I’ll look for you guys at Girl Talk!
January 29, 2008 11:47 am
Very slick analysis, and digestion of a lot of data. Re: best 50 albums, I’m experimenting with something of a friend-to-friend music recommendation service (http://plurib.us/musicrecommend/ for now, just a few months young), and the recommendations match up with surprisingly many of your best 50 albums. If the site were bigger (which it isn’t), it could save a lot of the data normalization steps in this sort of analysis. …I digress. Nice work!
January 29, 2008 12:11 pm
[…] View the entire list and read about the project here. […]
January 29, 2008 2:29 pm
[…] Nuestro ranking viene directamente de los fans vivos más apasionados, los music bloggers”, definen su lista que, además, funciona como una guía para descubrir música que se haya pasado por alto a algunos […]
January 29, 2008 3:07 pm
[…] Hypemachine hat man die Topkünstler, -songs und -alben von 2007 zusammengestellt. Hier kann man nachlesen, wie die Listen erstellt […]
January 29, 2008 3:53 pm
[…] recensão do álbum. O Hype Machine, que é um site que funciona como um agregador desses blogs, teve a idéia de juntar as listas individuais de melhores de 2007 de 648 desses blogs de MP3. O resultado foi o […]
January 30, 2008 4:20 am
nice work, hype machinery.
is this an algorithmic application or tabulated by hand?
January 30, 2008 10:55 pm
Great work! I found some I have missed last year!
love HypeM xxx
January 31, 2008 8:21 pm
This is an awesome reminder of tracks from the last year. Thanks. I’m with Justin, the latest track list is drinking from a fire hose. Daily, weekly or monthly versions of this for 2008 via RSS would be a great feature.
February 3, 2008 2:08 pm
Guys…
Please keep an eye on Los Angeles-based Layabout. Somewhat dormant right now, but recently back from a Germany tour. Good, good stuff:
http://www.layaboutband.com/music.html
-P. Staley
February 27, 2008 12:47 am
Don’t know what to say. At first it looked good but now I’m very disappointed in this kind of information
April 11, 2008 1:16 am
Good work
June 25, 2008 5:36 pm
[…] This year, we teamed up with Blogfresh Radio, imeem, Musebin and Tuneup Media to make our overview of music in 2008 even better than last year’s! […]
January 10, 2009 7:23 pm