The Hype Machine

How would you describe The Hype Machine to a friend?

Just some of the more interesting/entertaining responses:

• “one of the coolest sites on the web; a great place to find new music; well designed; easy to use”
• “Most addictive website. Ever. A great place to hunt down new music and make amazing accidental discoveries.”
• “the best web tool to discovering and finding music”
• “THE way to find the music you want and discover the music you didn’t know you wanted.”
• “A great place to hear stuff that’ll be big in six months”
• “Nearly too good to be true, a fool proof weapon when it comes to seeking new music that you’d otherwise not have a chance in hell of hearing.”
• “It’s not trying to hard to be some amazing revolutionary social music experiment, it just is.”
• “a stethoscope on the chest of aural awesomeness.”
• “The Indie Music CNN”
• “God’s gift to the internet”
• “Everything that’s still good about modern music, minus everything MTV turned into.”
• “The Hype Machine is really what makes the tides work. Screw the moon.”
• “Will change the way you discover music…I have said this on many an occasion!”
• “dude, hype machine solvd my problems, physically and emotionally.”
• “like eavesdropping on a million ‘have you heard this?’ conversations between friends”

Our survey is now closed and 1950 of you completed our survey! Thanks to everyone for their participation, it helps us to better understand our audience and how to better cater to you.

First up are the basic demographics like Age, Sex, Education and Income. You can check out the full charts on our Demographics page but I’ll just summarize here. The majority of you are 18-24 years old, male, attending college, make under $20K (most College kids are lucky enough not to have full time jobs!).

How do you discover new music?

The overwhelming majority of you use Online Discovery tools (like Hype Machine or surfing artist pages on MySpace), Music Blogs, and friend + family recommendations to find new music. Half of you use Online Recommendation tools like Last.FM or Pandora as well as print (magazines, newspapers) to find new music.

Some other interesting write-ins for ways you discover music:
# Concerts/Festivals (opening acts etc), DJ Sets, Clubs
# Artists on same record label
# iTunes Networking (when you can see shared music)
# “I ask random people on the street with headphones what they are listening to”
# “3000 of my father’s records (deceased record store owner)”
# Webcasts/Podcasts

Where do you spend your music budget?

The majority of you still spend most of your money to attend concerts. As a believe in the power of live music, this makes me smile. More than half of you still visit record shops and just about half purchase digital music.

Other popular write-ins:
# Music related DVDs/Books
# eBay/Used CDs

How much do you spend on music & music related activites per month?

95% of you regularly spend money on music with 61% of you spending $20 or more on music every month. Compare this to the $3.33 per month spent by the average consumer (source) and you can see that our audience not only is passionate about music, but supports the industry with their dollars.

How many concerts do you attend per month on average?

80% of you attend at least one concert per month, with 20% of you attending about 1 per week. This really highlights the fact that we should make it easier for you to find out about concerts. We recently added SongKick to our previous list of Eventful and Upcoming to provide concert data that you see in the sidebar of an artist page.

The long-awaited Pitchfork.TV launched today and I’m totally excited! Not only is it a beautiful site and already has some great content, but it looks like they will have special screenings of music related films every week!

This week’s featured film is the Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies. The Pixies’ 2004 reunion tour documentary follows their first rehearsals to the final show, and the drug addictions and inter-band tension in between.

I haven’t seen it yet, but Team Hype are all pretty BIG Pixies fans, and I’ve been wanting to get ahold of this for sometime. Remember, it’s available for streaming this week only, but you can check out the official site for info on ordering it afterwards.

Watch Full Film: loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies

We’re really excited to launch some new features we’ve been working on. If you check out your Dashboard page you will see our new+improved layout.

Here’s a full run-down:

• Loved Tracks: We now show your loved tracks by default when you come to your Dashboard page

Watchlist:

• Everything: This is what the old “Love Feed” was, a mixture of tracks from your favorite Blogs, Friends and Searches
• via Blogs: Only tracks from your favorite blogs
• via Friends: Only tracks from your favorite people
• via Searches: Only tracks from your favorite searches (which can be an artist name, a song name, anything really)

Listening History:

• Your History: Just like Last.FM, we now keep track of what you play on the Hype Machine
• Your Obsessions: Similar to Your History but shows you the tracks you just can’t get enough of. Good for people like Anthony, who play a track so much they wear the MP3 out.
• Friends’ History: Check out what your friends are listening to right now. Live social recommendations sans effort!
• Friends’ Obsessions My favorite new feature, this shows you what all your friends have been playing over and over and over. If a “loved” track from a friend is a good recommendation, this filters that list to the very best.

We’ve also updated the Spy page to include filters by country and popular states/provinces. So you can spy on what people in Quebec, Canada or even Japan are listening to right now!

More paths of discovery to come! Let us know what you think.

2008 PLUG Awards in NYC

The 2008 PLUG Awards in NYC by Stalman

We were nominated for the Best Website at the 2008 PLUG Awards earlier this month. Anthony attended the awards ceremony, sadly not wearing a cat-suit, and said it was good times. We lost to a very worthy competitor that some of you may have heard of and that I still love dearly: Pitchfork Media (anyone else excited about Pitchfork.TV!?)

It was also reassuring that their music awards, like best album, artist, live show etc were very reminescent of our recent Music Blog Zeitgeist.

SXSW 2008 in Austin, Texas
SXSW was incredible. Spending so much time around people that actually create and design things we use and love (and things we didn’t know existed!) was very inspiring.

It doesn’t do it justice, but here are is a short sampling of some of our experiences:

Scott Perry (New Music Tipsheet), Anthony, Rachel (from KCRW), and Taylor at the FADER Fort

Tantek, Hannah and Matt (from Last.FM), Anthony

Scott and Alexis Ohanian (from Reddit) at Gawker Media’s Party

The PureVolume Ranch (aka our home from 12am-4am every night for 10 days)

Graveyard, a rock band from Sweden was my favorite performance of the week. Listen on HypeM

The most web-cred crowd ever at the Emmy The Great Show. Seen in the crowd: Anthony, Taylor, Scott, Robert (from Donewaiting), Frank (from Chromewaves), Matt, Hannah, Jonas and Jeff (Last.FM), and Chirag (from Sched.org/Chime.TV)

Teaser: Look for actual awesome new features later this week

This past week we’ve been busy fixing lots of things around the site. Here’s what’s up:

- If you use Safari on a PowerPC (and sometimes Intel) Mac, we no longer crash your browser! We are sorry for doing that before; it was totally not personal. Tech details here (Thanks Chirag!)
- If you’re using Safari or IE6, save yourself. But our excellent badge page works as it should again, so go play!
- The site is also a ton faster which we are super-happy about!

Oh yeah, we’ve also re-designed how tracks appear on the site to emphasize what’s important, and make everything easily accessible. Check this out:

Now you’ve got easy links to buy the song you are looking at, or check out who heard or loved this song. Click “Fans”, and it looks like this:

You can switch the display back by clicking “Download” again. Of course you can still favorite the blog that wrote about the track by clicking the heart next to its name — “78s“, in this case.

Enjoy! Would love your comments as always, though if you say mean things, we reserve the right to mock you back.

From their website: “BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES tells the story of American music at this precarious moment. Filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation. The answers they found on this journey–ultimately, the promise that the future holds–are what makes BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES both riveting and exhilarating.”

I just finished watching this for the second time because it’s so great. A thoughtful look into what the music industry is and isn’t from those that have been there. Highly recommended.

The best part? If you sign up for free at bside.com you get 1 free movie credit that you can use to download this. Bside.com: Before The Music Dies

Film Trailer:

If you watch it, I’d love to hear what you think too.

So I made up this game that I’d like to share. Hopefully it’s not just me that is easily amused

1) Go to Songerize
2) Type a random word into the Song Title box
3) Be entertained for hours

Here are some words to get you started:

• bird
• elephant
• sex
• sandwich
• win

Go try it and share your best finds in the comments!

And we need your help to win! Read below to see how to vote for us.

The PLUG Independent Music Awards have been going on for a few years now. Each fall, an advisory board of ~300 people select nominees in over 30 categories like best Americana Album, Best Record Label, Best Album Packaging, Best Live Act and more. Then the nominees are set loose for the public to pick the winners!

This year we’ve been nominated for the best Music Website Of The Year, which is very exciting. Past winners for this award have gone to the musical juggernauts Pitchfork Media (’05 and ‘07) and Myspace (’06). We’ve made a great deal of progress and improvements to our little website over this year and think we have a shot! (Biased? Us?)

So if you enjoy using Hype Machine, please click and vote for us!
You can find us in: Media Categories » General Music » Website Of The Year
** You don’t need to fill out the whole thing, but need to vote in at least 5 categories before submitting your ballot.

Voting is open till February ‘08 so you have plenty of time to meet new people, become their friends and then introduce them to Hype! If we win, we plan to get drunk, party rockstar style, convince Anthony to wear the cat equivalent of this to the ceremony in March… and document the whole thing!

Symbaloo’s premise is simple. Create a customized homepage with drag-n-drop search modules and shortcuts. Sure there are at least a dozen other sites competing for your homepage spot with news headlines, rss feeds, weather modules and more. The thing that caught my eye about Symbaloo is it’s clean and unique design approach.

I also really like that you can customize everything before even signing up for an account (like we do with Hype accounts). This is a growing trend I really enjoy; giving every visitor to your site full features to experience and fall in love with, before making them commit to sticking around (and signing up).

Symbaloo were nice enough to add us to their music search module. If you head to their front page you will see a red Music box in the top right corner. Click it and then you can customize your default search to HypeM by clicking the small down arrow in the grey search area.

Inspired by Songza & Aza Raskin, we’ve made more improvements in how the in-page Flash player works.

It now appears at the bottom of each page along with information about the currently playing song and stays there as your scroll, making exploring music blogs that much better.

Enjoy and let us know what you think!

Thanks to everyone for the feedback you’ve given us over the past few weeks.

We’ve taken a close look at what was and wasn’t working and are excited to share this new update with you!

All Hype Machine pages are now using a new flash player (based on the JW MP3 Player, for those who want to know). It’s also active inside the popup windows on the site.

Here are a few of the things that have been fixed in this update:

- Volume and seeking controls in the player
- Issue where the player would mistakenly go to the next track when it would encounter buffering
- Issue where the player would not advance to the next track if in an inactive tab in Firefox/Windows. Note that this is still an issue in Safari

Just like with everything, would love to hear what you think, so feel free to write.

Del.icio.us user “taggedhype” (Careful, it’s a big list so may slow down your browser) has managed to take many items in our RSS feed and tag them by genre, name, location (ever visit “british_invasion” ?) or… you name it.

We are not big fans of genres but we do love other ways of sorting content. This is incredible.

We have a feeling this is someone we already know but we’d like to chat about this anyway.

Do you know taggedhype?

Email us if taggedhype is yours or you know who it is!

The Good

The new Hype Machine is brilliant, especially the way the whole page plays like a playlist.
http://hublog.hubmed.org

Anthony’s focusing on the right things and that’s why the new Hype Machine rocks.
I wrote a post recently saying that I don’t like favoriting music. But this is different. This is really bookmarking. It does something really useful.
http://avc.blogs.com/

Congrats to Anthony and his crew for making the best site on these internets even better.
http://www.fangbear.com/

povertyjetset: Hype Machine re-deux is freaking AMAZING!
Twitter update

This is totally sweet. The new Hype Machine kicks ultimate ass and takes many names. Hype Machine shows the open Internet is smarter than any one person, and those that use it as open are those that benefit entirely. Walled gardens SUCK. Please don’t parlay into them.
http://blackrimglasses.com/

The new Hypemachine interface is so approachable, that even the tail end of Generation Y will ‘get it.’
…
Hype Machine is way more historically significant than “In Rainbows.”
http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/

The Bad:

Get your barf bag ready, this one is a clunky monkey to be sure and the new logo is atrocious, kind of like staring at a steaming turd that’s arrived on your plate at a swanky restaurant only to find a giant slice of undigested corn and a toenail sticking out of the gnarled gooey end. Who designs shit like this? Terrible.
http://www.jockohomo.com/datapanik/

New larger type is horrible. Actually, it’s all sort of horrible. Looks like a site aimed at idiot children.
Hype Machine Blog Comment

Now this site is useless. Completely useless. You aren’t my homepage any longer. You aren’t even bookmarked any longer. R.I.P
PS - have to say it again - YOU BLEW IT.
Hype Machine Blog Comment

Then, there are lots of constructive ones, and while those are less fun, they’ve been hugely useful while tuning the new site. Thank you all for the interest!

UPDATE: Carles offers an excellent “best of” list in comments below.

Thanks again everyone for all your feedback. Angry, happy or both, we love it.

We’ve just updated the site with a new popup player on every page of the site that plays the whole page through.

Here are the links that open it up:

Also in this update, you can now see how many people are watching any blog we track, like this: http://hypem.com/list/1/

Would love to hear what you think!