Every Hype Machine Zeitgeist tabulates the best music of the year, as decided by music bloggers. This time, we thought it would be interesting to open the voting up to everybody and find out what albums everyone loved in 2011.
We built an album picker stocked with all albums released in 2011 according to Discogs, which over 4300 people used to create and share their top album plaques. The final rank was calculated by assigning points to every album (#1=15 points, 2=14, 3=13, etc), and tallying up the total score. Together with our annual blogger Top 50, the People’s Choice paints a fuller picture of the rich musical landscape of 2011. Explore both lists; you may discover a great album you’ve missed out on the first time around.
Too many people are reading the same websites too much. I was so naive that I thought the Internet brought us diversity.
January 9, 2012 2:58 pm
Music is down to personal taste. Some blogs will be bread for one person and butter for the other. I think visiting anything more than 20 decent blogs on a regular basis for music alone is excessive. You end up seeing the same songs for one thing and also it’s too time exhaustive. I suppose that’s the best thing about Hype Machine. They do all the work for you in regards to compiling the good stuff! Although I do wonder how they balance music genres with 852 blogs…
January 9, 2012 9:18 pm
Where oh where is the love for Theophilus London?
January 10, 2012 1:39 pm
@Rune, ditto: “Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.”
http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2009/03/online-monoculture-and-the-end-of-the-niche.html
not that I don’t love Hypem itself.
January 10, 2012 6:44 pm
if i never hear of bon iver, st vincent or foster the people again it will be too soon. popular internet culture isn’t any more diverse than offline culture. it’s just as easy to predict online top-50s as it is offline charts. slightly different music, but really the same thing.
if you don’t like the variety you see in blogs then make your own. i have one that gets almost no traffic, but i keep it mainly for myself. so much more music bombarding you from every corner than it was 10, 15 years ago, it’s hard to keep track of it all. i review things i hate as much as i review things i love, largely because i often find myself lost in the record store in a sea of even more names i have never heard of 🙂
January 16, 2012 11:15 am
Wow. Is the new bon iver that good? I expected it from npr listeners and big time bloggers. I officially have to give it a chance now. Also a little shocked only 3500 hypemachiners participated.
January 17, 2012 1:00 pm
If only 3500 voted out of the 40000 who like hypem on facebook (and will even not be the actual number of people dropping by somethimes), this list represents the votes of not even 10 percent.
Personally, I discovered a lot of interesting new music via hypem and I recommend everyone to not only search the “popular” list. Giving a chance to songs with hardly any votes can give you more surprisingly good songs than when you click on +1000’ers. There is some very mediocre stuff as well, must be said.
It’s also clear that some genres are overpresent on hypem. A magnificent album like Dream Theater (with a devoted fanbase of hunderds of millions) may not even be known to most of you. The album doesn’t even figure in the top50. There is hardly any rock or metal, tat’s a pity. But those shitty rappers recycling songs over and over again get a lot of exposure. How come? The number of dubstep remixes on hypem is massive and yes, there are some very good ones, but much overrated if you ask me.
Anyways, it won’t keep me from discovering new stuff on Hypem cuz’ it stays a goldmine for the ones with an acquired taste but with not enough time to do the search themselves.
Thx, Hypem!
January 18, 2012 5:00 pm
ya need ta get drake off the list, nahm sayin?
January 29, 2012 2:27 pm