Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

It’s here! Every day this week, we will be revealing more and more of the best music of 2008!

This year, we teamed up with Blogfresh Radio, imeem, Musebin and Tuneup Media to make our overview of music in 2008 even better than last year’s!

Here’s what we have for you:

1) Best 50 Albums of 2008 – We compiled data from over 700 year-end blog posts (many found via Largehearted Boy’s list of lists), analyzed it, and released it into the wild so everyone can see what bloggers were excited about in 2008.  You can listen to full previews of the albums via imeem and browse bite-sized reviews via Musebin. We’ve also shared the data we used to compile this list under a CC license so people can see what we are working with.  Check out last year’s post to see how we arrived at our numbers.

2) Zeitgeist 2008 Radio Show – Blogfresh Radio produced a kickass podcast series featuring the 50 albums in our Zeitgeist.  The shows include interviews with prominent music bloggers and plenty of music, so tune in every day for the next segment as we count down to the best album of 2008.

3) Best 50 Artists – We looked at what bands were written about most frequently in the past year and built a list of the top 50.  Then we mixed it with the most recent tracks for each of those artists to create a vibrant overview of the year in artists.

4) Best 50 Songs – We looked through our users’ favoriting activity and picked out the most loved songs of each month of 2008. We’ll release more data throughout the week, so keep checking back to see if one of your favorite songs made the list.

Enjoy, and let us know what you’re remembering/rediscovering/finding out about for the first time!