The Hype Machine is stoked to be partnering with The Great Escape Festival again this year.

The festival is a great opportunity to check out dozens of the emerging bands and artists you may already have discovered here on the Hype Machine. In fact, we asked a bunch of our favorite UK-based blogs to highlight their top picks for who to see this week. Check out their Blogorithm here.

We’re also presenting a lineup of our own, featuring Chloe Howl, Coasts, Archipel and Blue Hawaii, plus UK blog Radio Clubfoot DJing between sets.

Join us on Saturday (18 May) from 12noon – 4pm inside the ornate Paganini Ballroom at the Old Ship Hotel to see some of the festival’s most hotly-tipped acts. Hope to see you there!

(Oh, and say hey to Joe if you catch him – he’s our man in the UK.)

Hype Machine’s Hype Hotel, presented by Taco Bell, returned to Austin for another 5 days and nights of the best music being covered on music blogs. Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs. Bear, Stereogum, I Guess I’m Floating, YVYNYL, Yours Truly and PORTALS  joined us to curate night and day parties, championing great artists just like they do every day on their sites.

This year’s Hotel was the largest we’d ever built, with 1000+ capacity, even better sound, and even more lights. (Check out our making-of album here.) And once the doors opened, it filled up with all the unquantifiable stuff that makes live music so exciting—exuberant crowds, dancing (with friends), dancing (with strangers), boosting up a crowd surfer, and watching the band play that song, the one you first heard on the Hype Machine a month ago, that is now in your Obsessions list. It’s an incredible experience, and if you were at the Hotel this year, we’re sure you have some of your own favorite moments. If you didn’t make it, though, our partners Baebelmusic are putting up videos of full Hype Hotel sets every week—click here to watch.

None of this would have been possible without our presenting sponsor, Taco Bell, and their Feed The Beat program. Their support was essential in pulling off this gigantic endeavor, and our Hotel guests were especially grateful for all the free Doritos Locos Tacos and bean burritos they could eat (30,000 accounted for!) And of course, nobody left thirsty thanks to Miller, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, and Cabin Fever Whisky. Another big thanks to Jakprints, Baeblemusic, High End Systems, and Orange Amps for helping us make the event so great.

Were you there? Were you skanking to The Specials? Did you jump on stage and dance with !!!? Are you the guy that passed me a joint during Toro Y Moi? Tell us, we love hearing your stories.

To jog your memories, browse the gallery from our Lensley videobooth. Thank you for coming, and we’ll see you again next year!

Hype Hotel, presented by Taco Bell in support of its Feed The Beat program, is eight days of music, drinks, and tacos, March 9-16, 2013 in Austin, TX at Whitley (3rd & San Jacinto).

Lineups are curated by the Hype Machine team and the excellent Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs. Bear, Stereogum, I Guess I’m Floating, YVYNYL, Yours Truly and PORTALS. The event recreates the Hype Machine experience in real life, so that you can get away from listening to all this music on your phones, and come see it live. It’s better, really.

Passion Pit will also perform at Hype Hotel on March 11 with fellow Feed the Beat artist Wildcat! Wildcat! as part of Taco Bell’s first-of-its-kind rockumentary film – which will be created by fans online or at the show using #FeedtheBeat, and through a customizable live stream on FeedTheBeat.com.

A huge thanks to our presenting sponsor, Taco Bell, and sponsors: Miller, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Jakprints, Baeblemusic, High End Systems, Orange Amps, Lensley Automatic, and Cabin Fever Whisky.

RSVP is now open for free day shows. Night shows are open to SXSW badges/wristbands.

That’s why we’ve made the genre view available on the site some time ago. It uses Last.fm tags for each of the blogged tracks, and organizes them accordingly.

Recently we’ve been testing a new enhancement to this page. It lets you filter the tracks that show up in a given genre by the number of favorites they’ve received. So you can adjust your level of adventurousness here: early listener (between 0 and 25 favorites) or comfortably popular (500+ favorites).

Which one will you choose?

Let us know what you think!

Recently, though, we’ve been thinking more about the past. Reading essays like “Archive Fever” and playing with the amazing TimeHop app got us thinking: What bits of history does Hype Machine data contain? Our yearly Zeitgeists are fun, but they only paint with broad strokes: the top 50 artists, albums and tracks of the year. This approach misses moments and memories, replacing them with larger trends.

Realizing this, we went to work. We recovered over 5 years of weekly Popular charts on the site (that is an immense 272 weeks!), starting from the week of Oct 22 2007, the first full week that the site was live with the then-new favoriting feature (remember that?)

Enjoy!

We spend all of our time building things for music seekers, and it is thrilling to see you use and respond to what we’ve made.

It’s our seventh year (an eternity on the Internet), and we did a lot of new things.

Some of them were:

• Launched a brand new version of our iPhone app. The app was rewritten & redesigned from scratch and the difference is huge. It’s a free upgrade if you already have it, of course. Read what people said about it.
• Ran a 5 day (!) party at SXSW 2012 in Austin with 60 bands curated by 9 blogs, 18,000 free tacos from Taco Bell, 1800 bottles of vodka, 1200 cases of beer and 3 massage chairs. We lived, and people had fun.
• Made it easy to navigate remixes across the site and filter them out from the Popular page and the newest posts. Or, you can listen to ONLY remixes too, of course.
• Made a beautiful summary of the best music in 2012 with our yearly Zeitgeist, and had the amazing community on Tumblr vote for their favorite albums by reblogging and liking animated GIFs.
• Threw a few great shows at Brooklyn Bowl in NYC throughout the year, and music blogger meetups in Brighton, UK during the Great Escape, and Berlin, Germany during Berlin Music Week.
• Had a huge stage at Governor’s Ball, a perfectly executed music festival at Randall’s Island in NYC. At our stage, we had Built to Spill, Fiona Apple, Modest Mouse, Major Lazer, Chromeo, Passion Pit and many more. My diet for the weekend consisted exclusively of tiny cupcakes.
• Visited the BBC to talk about the most blogged artists of the year.
• Launched a Spotify app to introduce more people to music blogs
• Experimented with a way to watch all the new videos on music blogs with HMTV. Try it!
• Premiered 48 new albums a week before their release, made 12 episodes of our Music Blog Radio Show. Listen, if you missed out!
• Protested crazy legislation that was going to limit expression on the web (SOPA)
• Moved into The Secret Clubhouse - an awesome coworking space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We finally feel at home.
• Made countless improvements to the web version of the site. Everything is clearer, easier to find and faster.

It is a pleasure to be around people (you!) who are opening their minds to new things and fighting that lazy, seductive feeling of familiarity.

While many parts of the web work diligently to bring you stuff that’s catered to your existing taste (hint: it actually limits you!), we still think life is brighter when you step outside of your group of friends, the things that are comfortable to you, and jump into something entirely new.

This is also true outside of music on the web, so don’t just stop there. Take an active approach to discovering what you enjoy in the world.

See you next year, we have quite a bit in store.

Anthony & Team Hype Machine

Click here to vote

The top tracks and most-blogged artists of 2012 have been revealed, and now we want to hear from you—which albums will you remember the year by?

We’ve partnered with Tumblr to create GIFs of 75 releases that music bloggers have been talking about this year. Visit the Zeitgeist Tumblr and like or reblog to vote for your favorites in the ultimate list of the best music of 2012.

Voting closes on December 20.

(Special thanks to Mr. GIF, Flux Machine, Max Capacity, and Scorpion Daggerfor the GIFs)

Zeitgeist 2012 is LIVE!

We have some good stuff for you this year, as always:

Top 50 Artists: We looked at all the blog data we collected this year to generate the Top 50 Artists chart.  Then, we reached out to 50 amazing visual artists to make this beautiful chart.  Check out the art, hear a sample track by each artist, and find out more about their most recent record.

Top 50 Tracks: We looked at the most favorited tracks of 2012, gave these lists to a few awesome artists like The Hood Internet and Major Lazer (plus more coming later in the week). They drew on these tracks to create custom Zeitgeist Mixes. You can also find these on your iPhone in the “Radio Show” section of the app.

Top Albums: We’ve partnered with Tumblr to create GIFs of 75 releases that music bloggers have been talking about this year. Visit the Zeitgeist Tumblr and reblog the animated covers to vote for your favorites in the ultimate list of the best music of 2012.

Voting closes on December 20th, do it!
And if this is not enough for you, Largehearted Boy is maintaing his massive List of Lists, as usual.

Finally, if you are in NY, join us on December 8th at the Brooklyn Night Bazaar for an evening of music, album GIFs,and excellent holiday shopping.

Thanks for being with us in 2012!

We’ve been listening to your feedback over the past many months as we’ve been working on the new version of our iPhone app.

Today it’s out. Rewritten and redesigned from scratch, faster and more visual than ever, we are very proud to share it with you. It seems that some of you already like it. Thanks!

This is a free upgrade if you already have the app, and just $3.99 otherwise. Pick it up!

For those of you on Android, I am also excited to tell you that we are now working on an official app, so stay tuned! But in the meantime, you may find UberHype to be handy.