A few years have passed since I’ve written about our approach to Hype Machine’s Popular charts.
Since that post, we’ve prevented hundreds of artists and marketing teams from gaining an unfair advantage on our site. It’s disappointing, but it comes with the territory of maintaining a music chart that remains closely watched six years later. This has helped millions of people find some truly incredible music through each of the blogs in our index.
More recently, we’ve become concerned over some new patterns on music blogs themselves.
A handful of labels and PR outlets have focused their efforts on illicitly gaining coverage on Hype Machine-indexed blogs. The most common approach is to become a contributor at an established blog and post their clients (or clients their friends are promoting). For maximum impact, the same person would then get a spot at multiple blogs to create the appearance of broader support for the release. In some cases, the people running these blogs were aware of this, in others these discoveries have come as a surprise.
We have stopped indexing blogs that support such behavior or do not select their writers carefully. There are a few reasons why it’s important for us that this does not continue on Hype Machine:
• You should be able to listen to a track knowing that it was posted because the writer thinks it’s good—not because they’re a client.
• By creating a false sense of popularity for their artists, marketers can manipulate you into liking the music they are paid to promote. For example, if a track has been posted by many blogs, some of which are well-established, it is more likely to be heard and gain momentum through repetition. This encourages more blogs to post these artists, and the cycle repeats.
While blogs are an integral part of music marketing in 2015, we want to support bloggers, labels, and PR agencies that operate with integrity.
Glad to read this 🙂
May 19, 2015 5:37 pm
Love this! Kick ass Anthony! Let’s get the good music up there organically.
May 19, 2015 6:34 pm
Major hats off, the trend of people getting shine because they are good at marketing instead of being good at making music is super depressing. <3
May 19, 2015 8:18 pm
You all are so self-righteous and full of shit. It’s unbelievable what sniffling hipster drivel buy into your bullshit. You falsely accuse blogs of these things without pointing to any evidence to back yourselves up, you immediately nix blogs that are submitted for zero reason whatsoever, and you feature the same horse shit that more or less all sounds the same.
You all are what’s wrong with music in the 21st centuries, not these blogs that you’ve kicked off for no reason, churning out the same homogenized garbage and featuring track after track that I know for a fact has been sent out by a PR group. But you all are absolutely clean, huh? Yeah… fuck you guys.
May 20, 2015 1:40 am
Jesse got caught lol
Cry more.
May 20, 2015 4:40 am
I’d heart this if i could
May 20, 2015 4:59 am
“not these blogs that you’ve kicked off for no reason”
LOL – they’ve been kicked off because some of their writers were posting music by artists that were clients of their writers, giving an unfair advantage to those artists.
Hype Machine have quite clearly explained what they’ve done and why they’ve done it and I think the majority applaud the action they’ve taken.
This is a question of ethics and it’s good to see the Hype Machine guys have them.
May 20, 2015 5:08 am
Hopefully you have picked on the right websites. Worth considering a different way of grading entries from the current system, which uses the number of bloggers reviewing each track. Curating your lists instead could be an idea. Isn’t data without good judgement useless? And isn’t fighting the way internet PR works a bit like putting your finger in the leaky dyke?
May 20, 2015 5:12 am
hype machine disregards great music blogs for no reason …if a blog posted a song because it was great and they liked the track who cares who wrote the post?!?!? …get off of your high horse hype machine
May 20, 2015 7:37 am
Hear, hear – good on you hype machine!
May 20, 2015 8:40 am
This Hype Machine post “On Integrity and Blogs” is sponsored by Mazda, Miller Lite, and Tito’s Handmade Vodka.
May 20, 2015 9:59 am
Sounds great! Kind of curious as to which blogs got removed. I may have been following them.
May 20, 2015 9:59 am
Of note, to avoid misconstrued conclusions, not all of the blogs removed from Hypem these past weeks have bad integrity. This should be pointed out.
I Heart Moosiq was removed due to providing too much content. Content ranging a wide variety that the one writer and editor (no other contributors) believes to be good, never accepting to be paid for posts as indeed been offered, never posting because it’s a friend’s client, or a PR buddy’s artist, only selected based on writer’s own enjoyment.
It was removed, according to hypem, purely for sharing too much music. Please don’t read their piece above and conclude all blogs that have been removed lately are due to integrity issues. Thank you.
May 20, 2015 11:08 am
You guys stand true to the music and I can’t thank you enough for that!
May 20, 2015 1:34 pm
A small storm has developed in the music blogger world: Anthony Volodkin at The Hype Machine has kicked a bunch of bloggers off his aggregating platform alleging they were rorting the system.
Continue reading:
http://thepocketroad.com/pandoras/the-shape-of-the-funnel-fame-integrity-and-new-media
May 21, 2015 6:40 pm
ThePocketRoad nails it. Glad to get a mention haha. The algorithms are ridiculous on hypem, and they are trying to control what’s being heard and what sounds are en vouge whether you sheep want to believe it or not.
But really, A also sums up a huge problem… getting booted for too much content? So you want to spread the word about music, but you want to restrict how much music is being submitted? Are you fucking serious? Get a grip on yourselves… it just goes to show how much HypeM thinks they control the music landscape and how important they think they are.
May 21, 2015 9:59 pm
One more thing to add… Hillydilly was booted, a site that regularly features artists with under 200 fans or followers across various areas of social media…. yeah, I’m sure they’re casting a wide net and doing a PR firm tons of favors by featuring artists who are basically brand new.
May 21, 2015 10:02 pm
Fair play to you HypeM. I’ve been a fan for a long time now and I’m a full supporter of your service. Too many people sell out to corporate entities who think they own the world! Keep it real, maintain the feel 🙂
May 29, 2015 5:29 am
You guys and gals truly care about what you do. Thanks for what you do to keep the service fair and true to it’s core purpose and function.
June 2, 2015 10:20 pm
Good on Hype Machine for standing for what’s right. So many blogs have been rorting the system for too long.
June 7, 2015 9:22 pm
There were also a big group of blogs (included in the sweep) that dedicated themselves to post the songs other blogs indexed on HM had already posted. This creates no value to the pool of blogs or HM in general and will not be missed.
As a 3-year-old blog on HM, I support the decision taken by Anthony and the team. It hurts me to see some of these blogs go as I am a fan of some of them and sad that the unique content they were posting might not find its way into HM.
June 18, 2015 4:05 pm
Word up HM keep it clean!
June 25, 2015 3:40 pm
I support this.
July 1, 2015 11:25 am
I love this!
Whats the best way for an un-known artist to submit their music to blogs to potentially get on HYPEM?
thank you
July 7, 2015 5:48 pm
@pointblake…. The best way is to have industry connections it looks like to me. Leon comes out the gate just posting a song on soundcloud and it goes to number one on hypemachine within days. She didn’t even write it by herself. All these major blogs jump all over it and post it the first day. That simply doesn’t happen if you are unknown and not well connected and submitting music manually by emailing each blog. They generally ignore you. I don’t even think they open the email. So hype machine is actually mostly reporting on music from artists signed on well connected labels. not major labels, necessarily. But well connected. And some blogs tell you they will review you if you pay them to. How much money did Leon’s PR team shell out for that press, I wonder? The bigger blogs are reporting on major label artists. Indie musicians are being shut out of the blogosphere now just like the radio stations for the same reason. Artists don’t have the money and clout to get their music heard. Not,easily. Sorry to pick on Leon because I liked her song, but it’s really frustrating watching her get to the top so easily for a song she didn’t write by herself.
July 12, 2015 1:41 am
love the honesty and transparency. keep it truthful always, give the people what they want
July 22, 2015 1:13 pm
Make no mistake, HillyDilly in particular and others like them were culled because they’re beating HypeM at their own game. Anyone who’s run a music blog indexed by HypeM knows there’s no rhyme or reason to their selections and zero transparency on why people are dropped from the list. There’s nothing egalitarian happening here; the small staff at HypeM wants to maintain their traffic numbers, at all cost, including the quality of the charts. It says quite a bit that they’d even pull a sweep like this, without any real attempt to work with site owners on whom their product relies.
If you have a blog on HypeM, you have an inbox clogged to the brim with promoter’s emails. You know the agencies and PR folks and what they’re pushing, and then you often find it in the Top 20 on HypeM; the major music blogs driving the very thing this post claims to combat.
July 28, 2015 2:49 pm
I think one important change that would really put integrity in the blogging community is for blogs on Hype Machine to be required to include their sources in their posts… 1) PR 2) Artist Direct Submission 3) Other Blog and have a popular chart for each source. I have no interest in crappy songs that are popular because they have the best PR. A truly independent artist doesn’t have money to pay a PR firm. I think this would encourage more blogs to review direct artist submissions, especially if the public becomes aware that they are just being spoon fed PR drivel.
Also, because Soundcloud and Youtube releases don’t include production or writing credits, a major label can finance a new artist, hire a cowriter and producer and pay for PR and bloggers will report the artist as an independent singer/songwriter. I wonder if that’s not happening already.
July 31, 2015 8:07 am
Interesting to see how the recent blog cull has effected different blogs. Repeat Button has virtually stopped posting – suggesting it was just a site used by PR guys to write their own posts to get the tracks more exposure on Hype Machine and nothing more or otherwise it was over reliant on Hype Machine for traffic – which means that no one really valued its content anyway. Hilly Dilly however is still going great guns and doesn’t seem to have changed at all.
August 6, 2015 1:29 am
Great! Indepedent bloggers really trying to make an effort to have their music taste the main part of the music blog is so important! Enough of this fake blogging. We are 100% here to put music first. <3
Keep Smiling!
September 10, 2015 1:54 pm
Nice post on Integrity. Not only musician but everyone have to keep Integrity to get success in business and life. We say Integrity is- Doing the shit that you said you were going to do. Nothing more… Nothing Less..
January 7, 2016 9:25 am
I totally get this. I wrote for earmilk for almost 2 years and while I never made money from or worked in PR everything seemed to bend for the big companies… it was exhausting. I stopped writing until now to create my own blog site. Turns out I love music too much to stop entirely 😛
January 11, 2016 7:57 pm
It’s funny how HYPEM chooses to kick certain websites off for allegedly having contributors working with PR agencies, etc. but at the same time they offer SPONSORED MUSIC which is just hilarious to me. So backwards. A lot of my favourite blogs are now gone.
January 24, 2016 3:21 pm
Great insight, guys keep it up!
March 11, 2016 4:49 am
Every single music fan knows your list has turned to absolute garbage in the last two years. You pull songs from the list that are clearly not backed by your affiliates and you guys honestly just don’t seem to really care about discovery anymore, just popularization. I, personally, am disappointed with the direction this has gone. I’ve been on HypeM for 6 years and I have only seen a decline in quality. I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.
July 12, 2016 2:05 pm
Don’t forget that now many of the HypeM supported blogs will only receive submissions via paid sites like Submithub.com. So in the end, artists are paying out of their pockets just to be considered by many of your blogs. I don’t know what the right way or wrong way is, but it seems like it always comes back to independent artists being forced to hand over cash for consideration – either PR or now SubmitHubs.
I agree in fair play, but let’s look at all sides here. People will always find loopholes & exploit them, I think it’s up to HypeM to setup whatever rules they think works best & enforce them the best they can.
I also wish someone would explain the disappearing hearts phenomenon to us (in a Blog Post or something). Is it a glitch or a penalty?I think we’d all benefit from understanding ALL the rules!
Thanks guys & keep up the good work.
August 30, 2016 3:35 pm