Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

Welcome to our yearly State of Hype Machine’s Crowdfunding update. We’ve been doing this for over two years now, and would like to share with you…

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Hard to believe, but it’s been a whole year since we launched our funding campaign. Thanks to our supporters, the three of us have been able to …

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Hype Machine turned 12 last week! That’s a long time for any service, especially an independent one. How long have you been listening with us?

To celebrate, we’ve redesigned the site for better navigation and playback, and added a few new features.

We’ve also introduced a way to fund our work directly. With your support, we can continue to build new pathways for music discovery for many more years to come. Join us here.

Update May 20, 2017 We’ve reached our first goal of 1,000 supporters, our first step towards sustainability. Thank you! A lot of work is ahead, however – to continue developing the service we need at least 3,000 monthly supporters. Join us.

Update May 22, 2017 Read what our supporters are saying about Hype Machine.

Update July 21, 2017 We’ve reached our second goal of 3,000 supporters! Thank you!

Hype Machine launched in April 2005. We started running ads a few months later to cover growing hosting costs, and have remained an ad-supported service ever since. Ours is a straightforward business: we make money from display advertising and use it to build products that help people find new music. Unlike most internet companies, we don’t have investors or other funding.

We are grateful to everyone who’s purchased our mobile apps since we began releasing them in 2011. These sales allowed us to maintain the apps and develop new features, and we thank you for your support and enthusiasm.

We wish we could have kept our apps ad-free. But with just three employees filling dozens of roles, Hype Machine has to rely on a steady source of income to pay for servers and pay each other. Over the past few years, many of our listeners have moved from the web to our mobile apps. Combined with an industry-wide decline in display ads, this has had a serious impact on our revenue. The difference is significant enough that a one-time app purchase can no longer support our service, something that advertising still creates an opportunity to do.

Since we launched mobile ads in December 2016, there’s been a strong show of support for an ad-free option in the apps. We are exploring ways to make this happen, most likely through a subscription model. It means a lot to us that so many of you like what we’ve built over the years, and want to see it keep going for many more.

If you are interested in an ad-free Hype Machine, please sign up below:

If you have feedback, write us a note.

This past Friday, December 2, 2016, we enabled ads in our Android app.

We released Hype Machine for Android in October 2014 as a $3.99 premium app. The revenue from these sales allowed us to publish many updates, including a full rewrite, maintaining the app as the Android platform underwent rapid changes.

Unfortunately, we were not able to generate enough sales to support our small team and continue development. Unlike many other online services, we don’t have outside funding. Hype Machine is a straightforward business – we get revenue from advertising and invest it into making products for music listeners.

We understand that it’s frustrating to have paid for the app and now see ads on your screen. Though the app became free in April, we’ve waited until December to introduce ads as a small sign of our appreciation of your earlier support. Whether you bought the app years ago or months ago, we hope that the music it’s brought into your life has been worth it.

In the coming months, we’ll be working to make sure the app continues to help you discover new music while keeping the ads as unobtrusive as possible.

I wish we could provide an ad-free experience, but we simply would not be able to continue maintaining the app without this revenue.

UPDATE 12/14/16

We considered many options before introducing ads in our apps, and there are many reasons why subscription/donation/IAP offers were not workable for us at the time (for example, supporting two product experiences is tough for a team of three people).

Given the strong show of support for an ad-free solution since the announcement, we are looking into ways people could remove ads in the apps. If you are interested, sign up here.

UPDATE 03/23/17

Ads in our mobile apps have been temporarily disabled.