Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

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).