Machine Shop: The Hype Machine Team Blog

The Zeitgeist is here! Our annual roundup of the 50 most-discussed artists, albums, and songs of 2010 launches today. We’ll reveal 10 every day this week, with the Top 10 being released on Friday. Here’s how we made it:

Top 50 Artists: We’ve tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2010 by blogs on The Hype Machine, and invited 50 visual artists to create illustrations for the musicians. You can view them in glorious full-screen resolution while you sample a track from the band. AND! This year, you can send each gorgeous piece of artwork as a postcard to your friends. It’s the closest you can get to hugging a pixel.

Top 50 Albums: We’ve pored over 950 blogger Top 10 lists (the most to date!) and thousands of albums to calculate the final ranking. Grooveshark kindly provided the full album streams, and we’ve used CC-licensed Flickr Photos for the graphics.

Top 50 Songs: We’re excited to present five new mixes of the year’s top songs, created for us by the artists who were dominating the Popular charts in 2010. We’ll also publish the full list of Top 50 tracks on Friday.

As always, the Zeitgeist is one big community effort. Big thanks to all the music bloggers, who make finding the best new music easier; the illustrators and photographers, who make the Zeitgeist look so good; Jeff from Heart On A Stick, who passed the torch a few years back; David from Largehearted Boy, who is the best at collecting best-of lists; Grooveshark (and @bwc), who power the full album streams, SoundCloud, who power the Hype Machine Radio Show; our incredible friends Cain Norris, Michael Bringardner, Lisa Zuniga, Morgan Kelton, and Emma Tangoren for helping us with data slicing and dicing; the entire Hype Machine team, for working through Christmas and New Year’s, every year, to bring you the Zeitgeist. And you: thank you for always looking for new music to fall in love with.

JAN 8 UPDATE: You can now download the entire data set (in a CSV file) we gathered to make the Top 50 albums list this year.  The compiled set [CC License] is a more expanded version of our top 50 list that includes some extras, like the average rank given to an album in each post.  The raw set [CC License] has the list of all blog posts we’ve indexed and the albums they’ve selected.  Enjoy!

It’s taken us a week to recover, but we’re finally beginning to feel human again! Thank you to the thousands and thousands of people who made it to our party across the 4 days of SXSW Music. Fifty-six hours of music, over 100 bands+djs, 1000 breakfast tacos, and cases upon cases of Vitamin Water and Heineken later, we’ve definitely left a dent in 6th street.

We’ve thrown a few day or night shows in the past, but this was the largest undertaking we have ever been a part of. A lot of things went right, just a couple of things went wrong, and we learned a whole ton of things. We learned that it is difficult to fill up a 1,500 person capacity during the day, when people are still sleeping off the night before. We learned that events are hard. We learned that it all feels worth it when you’re dancing in the middle of a thousand people at midnight, and everybody’s smiling.

We simply couldn’t have done it without the teamwork of:

Black Box Revue, who invited us to be a part of their Lose Control party this year and brought together an amazing group of people who genuinely care about music. The Windish Agency for helping us out with most of the booking, stage plots and logistics. Beatnik and their team for literally being the backbone that kept the whole party together by providing sound, stage, lighting, and a relentless crew who were in it for the long haul. David Schacher and Beef for providing all kinds of logistical help and being troopers through it all. Emily Moore for the amazing photography. NoMathmatics for the incredible Lose Control art.

And what would a Hype Machine party be without music? Serious thanks to all the bands and management that helped make this happen: 12th Planet, Acrylics, Admiral Radley, Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Auto Body, Baby Monster, Bachelorette, Bang Bang Eche, Baron Von Luxxury, Black Box Revue, Body Language, Casiokids, CFCF, Chiddy Bang, Class Actress, Crystal Fighters, The Crystal Method, Crystal Vision, Dances With White Girls, Database, Delorean, Delta Fiasco, Eclectic Method, Eli Smith, Everything Everything, Fenech-Soler, First Aid Kit, Free Magic, French Horn Rebellion, Grrrl Parts, Grammatics, Hey Champ, Hollywood Holt, Home Video, Hottub, Hussle Club, Javelin, Jen Lasher, Keenhouse, Keepaway, Kids At The Bar, Kill The Noise, Lemonade, LexiconDon, Light Pollution, Lucy and the Popsonics, Male Bonding, Megaphonic Thrift, MeLo-X, Michael Parallax, Mickey Factz, Midnight Conspiracy, MillionYoung, Nice Nice, Nick Catchdubs, Nomathmatics, OK Deejays, Rafter, Royal Bangs, Rural Alberta Advantage, Rye Rye, Samuel, Small Black, Solid Gold, Spleen United, Star Eyes, Steed Lord, Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt, The Death Set, The Hood Internet, The Invisible, The Ruby Suns, Tobacco, Tommie Sunshine, Toro Y Moi, Trash Yourself, Treasure Fingers, Two Fresh, Uffie, VDRK, Villains, Wallpaper, We Are Like The Spider, WhoMadeWho, Woodhands, Yacht, Yes Giantess, You Say Party! We Say Die!, Richard Gear, eLstar, Prepmode, A Ward, Mike Townsend, Kook Hersh, Irresponsible Voltron Crew, Hot Britches, Miguel Angel, DJ Cat NYC, Automatic Panic, Mad Classy Crew.

And our sponsors, Vitamin Water, for keeping everyone hydrated during the day. Heineken, for keeping the bands rockin’. Townie Records, for providing the breakfast tacos each day. SoundCloud for providing the WiFi and HypeCloud player, making it easy for bands to share their music with bloggers. And last but definitely not least, Jakprints for providing the banners and 11,000 RSVP laminates.

More photos of the show from Emily Moore or check out the slideshow:

If you were there, let us know what you thought. If you couldn’t make it, tell us where we should throw the next one!

Our annual Music Blog Zeitgeist 2009 is here. All week we will be publishing the Top Artists/Albums/Songs (10 each day) and on Friday you will find out the top 10 of the year!

The Zeitgeist presents an interesting challenge each year: how do we keep taking things to the next level? This year won’t disappoint. Here’s a rundown:

Top 50 Artists: We tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2009 by blogs on The Hype Machine. Then we invited 50 visual artists to create a new piece of artwork inspired by the band’s music and including the band’s name. The results have absolutely blown us away. If you love a piece, click through and let the artist know!

Top 50 Albums: We collected 550 bloggers’ personal top 10 lists and assigned a total score to each of the 1,313 albums (#1=15 points, #2=14, #3=13…) to get a final ranking. We partnered with Grooveshark to power the full album streams and used CC-licensed Flickr Photos of each band as the background. You can also view the full photo behind each album and explore the individual lists that mention an album.

Top Songs Show: We changed things up a bit this year and presented our list of the most favorited songs of each month as a downloadable radio show. Since this generally skews to the dancier side of things, this is a fantastic mix to keep the party going.

This was truly a community effort and wouldn’t have been possible without the musicians who put out such inspiring music, our own users, the 50 visual artists, the 50 photographers, the 550 bloggers, Jeff fromHeart On A Stick (who passed the torch a few years back), David from Largehearted Boy (who does an insane job at collecting best-of lists), Grooveshark (my Gainesville neighbors powering the album streams), Monika Wensel (the artist behind the fabric art on the splash page), SoundCloud (our Berlin friends powering the Radio Show), Adam and Gregory (for the 1-line review inspiration), our Radio Team (Dev, Abbey, Dan) and of course the rest of our awesome team @ The Hype Machine (Anthony, Zoya, Arkadiy, Scott).

Now…go fall in love with something new.

Last week, we ran what’s called a “site takeover” for a new single by P. Diddy.  A site takeover, or skin allows the advertiser to customize the look of many prominent parts of a website.  Today, we are running one for the new Kid Cudi record released tomorrow.

We’ve received a variety of responses to this highly visible campaign, and one email from Taz managed to summarize most of the frequent concerns into a single message.  I’ve asked Taz if I can share his emails to us and my responses, they are reproduced below in italics with his permission.

Taz:

Puff Daddy on the page?  I understand making a profit because you are a business, but come on.  Puff Daddy has never been on hypem because he is not a good artist for your target market.  I’m offended by this advertisement.  I used to listen to Pandora until they sold out.  You need to consider what the community thinks about this.

Anthony Volodkin:

Thanks for writing about this.

We are still working out the kinks with some ad campaigns.  I agree
that the execution of this one could be better.

On the other hand, it is also clear that this is an ad and not the
normal blog content which remains unaffected.

How did Pandora sell out?

Taz:

Thanks for the response.  I appreciate that you took the time to do this.

Here is why I think it could be a concern:  Hypem is special because the community are music hunters.  Unlike the majority of the market, your community seeks music to listen to instead of being fed music.  Radio stations and TV shows typically advertise and sell the music that pays the most, so its not really “good” music anymore. Record labels can obviously write the biggest check, so they get the airtime.  This drives away music hunters because the quality is typically not as enjoyable as truly good music.  Hypem is exactly what music hunters love because it is a truer system of measurement, determined by users and not executives.

What I fear is that once these record labels start dominating an entire page, what is to stop them from appearing on the front page for music?  It is all web space in the long run.  These people have so much money that they will approach you, if they haven’t already, with this idea.  As a business, I think this is great, but I still don’t want my music experience affected by a business deal like this.  If you can assure me that the content will never be promoted or the voting system will be taken advantage of, I am ok with this.  I just understand how money can determine these types of things and I dont want to see hypem sell out this way.

Pandora sold out because selected artists have a much better chance of showing up on a listener’s playlist.  They are literally a radio station, so labels pay them money to “show up more” on playlists.

However, if you are approached with this type of thing, I would encourage you to have a different section for this.  One way to approach this have a “hypem staff favorites” page.  Your staff could list promoted songs and then list them as their personal week favorites.  No one would suspect otherwise because it would be the “opinions” of the staff.

I use Hypem everyday and love it, so if I can help maintain how it functions, I will.

Anthony:

Responses to specific paragraphs below:

> What I fear is that once these record labels start dominating and entire
> page, what is to stop them from appearing on the front page for music?

We are there to stop them.  We delineate between content and
advertising carefully. When I started the Hype Machine several years
ago, these were the exact concerns I had about how music gets through
radio and magazines.

> It is all web space in the long run.

It’s not THAT simple, the context and how things are presented is
really important.  The P. Diddy campaign was very obviously an ad and
did not come from one of our trusted blogs.

> I just understand how money can determine these types of things and I
> don’t want to see hypem sell out this way.

We work diligently to prevent all sorts of manipulation of charts, as seen here:

1: http://blog.hypem.com/2009/06/on-chart-integrity/
2: http://blog.hypem.com/2009/07/more-on-integrity-and-promotion/

> Pandora sold out because selected artists have a much better chance of
> showing up on a listeners playlist.  They are literally a radio station, so
> labels pay them money to “show up more” on play lists.

I am not familiar with this program, but I’d have to imagine they
disclose this to the listener when it takes place.  This is available
on Last.fm and I think they disclose it as well, though it has yet to
see wide adoption.  Labels with successful acts (for example, Matador
Records) don’t typically pay for this kind of stuff anyway -
they are confident enough in their work and choices to see it featured
in blogs, magazines and elsewhere.

> However, if you are approached with this type of thing, I would encourage
> you to have a different section for this.  One way to approach this have a
> “hypem staff favorites” page.  Your staff could list promoted songs and then
> list them as their personal week favorites.  No one would suspect otherwise
> because it would be the “opinions” of the staff.

Hehe, this’d be sneaky – why would we hide the promoted stuff in this
fashion?  We have personal integrity too!

You’ve asked some good questions here, would it be ok for me to post
this email thread on our blog (or on my personal blog)?

I’d love your thoughts on all this too.

Some of the benefits of having a Hype Machine user account are cool new ways to share the music you discover.

Connect your account to Twitter and the machine will auto-tweet your favorite songs. Connect to Last.fm and you’ll be able to keep track of everything you listen to on your Last.fm profile! Here’s how:

Step 1: After you are logged in, hover over My Profile, then click on Settings.

Step 2: Click the External Services tab and sign in to your Twitter or Last.fm account. We use OAuth for authentication, so you do not need to enter a password. Do make sure you’ve checked the “Enable” box for each service you want to use, and click Save.

Step 3: You’re done! The Hype Machine will now automatically post tracks you’ve loved to Twitter, and track songs you’ve listened to on your Last.fm profile.