We love the integration of useful, well-made services on the internet. That’s why we let you scrobble to Last.fm, tweet about your new favorite song, and find show dates right in our sidebar.
Well, we’ve been hosting our radio shows with SoundCloud, and bloggers kept asking, “If you love SoundCloud so much, why don’t you aggregate it?” So now…we can!
Tracks that are shared via embedded SoundCloud players will show up on The Hype Machine so bloggers using this great service don’t need to re-host the files elsewhere. The writers have an easier time sharing the music they’re discussing, artists who upload their songs to SoundCloud have an easier time checking their play counts using SoundCloud’s analytics, and everyone has an even better music experience.
Now that all 50 illustrations for the Top 50 artists have been revealed, I thought I would share how we ended up with this gorgeous, inspired gallery of music artwork.
Some of the artists are friends. Some—Khoi Vinh (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart), Mike Perry (Grizzly Bear)—are personal heroes. Hannah Donovan (LCD Soundsystem) masterfully designs our UK bff, Last.fm. The many excellent cartoonists—r stevens (Bloc Party), Jamie McKelvie (La Roux), Dan Meth (Kanye West), Tom Humberstone (Iron & Wine), Julia Scheele (Florence + The Machine), Meredith Gran (The xx)—are a nod to years spent reading webcomics. I met Noah Kalina (The Big Pink) in a Blockles battle, and Josh Gosfield (Bob Dylan) while waiting for Ratatat to go on at The Music Hall of Williamsburg. Yiying Lu (Michael Jackson) made the Twitter fail whale! Deastro’s (Metric) music is frequently discussed on the Hype Machine, but I don’t think that many people knew about his killer collage work (he does his own album art, too).
But most of all, I looked through the wealth of talent being shared on artist communities like Eat, Sleep, Draw, as well as indexhibit and Flickr, and asked artists to recommend friends. The result is a collection of artwork as awesome and diverse as the music in our charts. But I know that everyone has starting doodling something of their own while lost in a song, so share it! Upload it to Flickr, post it on your blog, show us how you interpret your music. Here’s a different take on Vampire Weekend, for starters:
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).
Hype Machine indexes hundreds of music sites and collects their latest posts for easy streaming and discovery. We're here to help you find the best new music first.
Our annual