The Hype Machine

We just teamed up with the team over at MIXA to release a limited edition MIXA designed by our own Zoya Feldman.

MIXA’s are USB-drives cleverly designed like a cassette tape that would make giving a mixtape/muxtape to somebody extra special. If you’d rather design your own, you can use premade templates or even pull in photos from Flickr.

(above image via Geek Sugar’s coverage on MIXA)

Related & highly recommended reading is Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape, which chronicles his relationship over the years with coordinating mixtapes. It is a quick read and will make you want to revive the ancient art of mixtapes. It also motivated me to go back and listen to Pavement again.

And if you’re looking for inspiration on what to fill your mixtape with check out Cassette From My Ex which is best left to The Guardian to describe:

Before iPods and MP3s there was only one way to impress a new potential love mate - make him or her a C90 mixtape. The consequences of this were perilous: based on your choice of tracks they could conclude that you were a freak, a potential psychopath or merely incompatible due to your obsession with early-80s jazz-funk. Those who hope these errors of judgment are now filed away in some distant landfill will be disturbed to learn that this website serves as a venue where owners of said cassettes can reveal them to the world - and the world can listen in - plus their tales and the artwork. One cover features a cunning lift-up flap that reveals a photograph of the maker’s “beautiful tallywacker”. Classy.

We just released a bunch of tweaks we’ve been working on over the past few weeks. Little fixes and additions like revised nav, search suggestions and more. And we finally have A MERCH PAGE, with our necklaces and t-shirts for sale! You might have to refresh once or twice for everything to show up correctly.

If you run into any issues, please describe in detail and provide browser + operating system info, thanks!

For those reading at home, simply open up your copy of Business Driven Technology and flip to page 195.

Does that mean using Hype Machine counts as studying now?

Thanks to Jui Ramaprasad for the photos and heads up!

If you are a fan of Muxtape (who isn’t?) and the Hype Machine (we hope so!) you can now get some tasty HypeM links put into your Muxtapes with the help of Firefox + Greasemonkey (Install Greasemonkey first).

Check it out: Userscripts: Muxtape link to Hype Machine by our friend (and music blogger) Paul Irish.

And of course if you have a Muxtape, share in the comments!

Update: The survey is now closed, thanks everyone!

Our 2nd ever User Survey is upon us! This is where we get a chance to learn a bit more about who you are, what you think of the Hype Machine and what you’d like to see here in the future. You can check out some info from our last survey on our Demographics Page and various blog posts.

But all work and no play = no fun, so we’ve spiced it up with some sweet giveaways of stuff we wish we could keep to ourselves! If you complete the survey and include your email, you’ll be eligible to win:

# (2) A MIXA digital mixtape (1gb flash drive customized to look/feel like a mixtape!)
# (3) $25 gift card to Etsy.com’s Etsy Labs store
# (3) A Hype Machine Heart Necklace (made out of old vinyl records!)
# (2) A Green Hype Machine Shirt (The ones with the heart bubble on ‘em)
# (2) A White Hype Machine Shirt (The brand new ones with silver ink + new design!)
# (3) A laser-engraved Moleskin notebook by Engrave Your Book (The “Tools of Creation” cover)

Take the survey & win stuff →
Survey now closed, thanks for participating!

Just in case you missed it, we’ll be wrapping up the T-Shirt RSVP form soon. We aren’t accepting payments yet, but you can RSVP a shirt, leave your email and we’ll drop you a note when they are ready!

Our “classic” design being reprinted:

And a new offering, silver ink on a white tee

Reserve a shirt

Note: Unlike Hype Machine Monthly, this is real

We are really, really excited to announce our first and ongoing print publication, the Hype Machine Monthly. Read all about it and subscribe today!

Update: Sorry, we aren’t looking for writers, this is an April Fool’s joke! Thanks to Kaela for playing the part of Amy.

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.

Remember that contest we ran giving away awesome Vling Vling vinyl jewelry? Well we finally got our own paws on some of those custom heart bubble necklaces we sent to the winners and we think they are H-O-T.

We only worked with James to create enough for the winners (and our team) but we’d love to hear your thoughts on us creating/selling more here at Hype Machine. Girls, would you wear these? Would you pay for these?

In the meantime, if you are craving some vinyl jewelry of your own (that isn’t the Hype Machine heart bubble) you can check out the rest of VlingVling’s offerings and enter code HYPEM at checkout for 15% off your order.

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

2 days away till my favorite week of the year begins! This will be Scott’s and my 4th SXSW and Anthony’s first (!!!). Zoya is staying behind to take care of the LOLCats, but she will be missed! This week is all excitement and the week after will be complete exhaustion

If you are one of the lucky ones also attending SXSW this year, you will *love* a little webapp my friend Chirag and I put together last week.

It’s called SCHED and is the ultimate SXSW scheduling website. We include ALL official panels, films, and bands as well as all the unofficial shows and parties we can get our hands on. You can save + share with your friends, and it’s even set up with a map for printing.

We’d love to meet you! You can check out our Team Hype group schedule to see stuff we’ll be attending. We’ll be in Austin from March 7th to the 16th; we’re in it for the loooong haul!

And don’t forget the PLUG Awards are tomorrow night! If you sign up over at the Dell Lounge you can get access to the live webcast of it starting at 8PM tomorrow night (Thursday, March 6).

The whole HypeM team are long time Last.FM users (and fans!). We also listen to a lot of music on The Hype Machine, so why not have that music show up on your Last.FM profile? I, for one, always wonder, if I heard a song but it didn’t get scrobbled, did I really listen to it?

Well now you can!

Just go to the homepage and then click “Settings” in the black toolbar. Once you enter your user/pass, just go back to enjoying music on Hype Machine. All your tracks will be scrobbled to your Last.FM profile page.

While we’re on a roll, we’ve also set up a group for The Hype Machine on Last.FM so you can connect with other Last.FM users and share your HypeM profiles.

This is how music on the web should work, services playing with each other to create meaningful awesomeness

We’ve finally chosen our winners! Thanks to all who participated, we had 184 total images submitted. In no particular order, here were our favorite 10:

By Cristina

By Laura

By The Bridge Club 5

By Iain

By Marky

By Benjamin B

By Sam Thompson

By Mischeif

By Caitlin

By Oli Sabin

Each winner gets 1 pair of earrings of their choice from VlingVling.com and a custom made heart-bubble necklace just for Hype Machine!

I will be contacting the winners via email about their prizes! Thanks everyone!

We had SUCH an awesome response to our contest. Thank you to everyone for entering! These are a blast to flip through. We’ll be posting the winners soon!

Here’s a slideshow of all the entries:

View all 182 entries on Flickr

A bit behind schedule, but hey I’m in Mexico for a week, our internet is slower here

The contest is now closed, we will be announcing winners soon!

We’re throwing a contest to give away some sweet swag!

Photo by My Daily Struggle on Flickr.

Contest: Download the heart bubble graphic below and put it into any photo (your photo or one you have permission to use). Get creative! Photoshop it on cats, babies, record label executives or anything else you can come up with.

Heart Graphics: 800px wide | 400px wide | 200px wide | 100px wide

Upload it to any photosharing site and provide a link in the comments below. Team Hype will pick 10 favorites and announce the winners on Monday (Feb 18th). We’ll also use them around our site (for house ads, promoting new features on our site, etc)

Prizes! Original Vinyl Jewelry by Vling

James DesRochers from Vling (Vinyl+Bling!) makes awesome jewelry out of old records. He is creating some awesome pieces for the prizes! Each winner will receive a pair of earrings of their choice (over 25 designs on vling.com) AND a custom-made necklace of the heart bubble graphic made just for Hype Machine! Take it for yourself or give to your sugar mama, you can’t go wrong.