Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

It’s here! Our 10th annual roundup of the year’s best music, with the most-discussed artists and videos of 2016, and every longread we’ve Stacked each week. To start, we’ve compiled a few of the stories we’ve followed in Stack throughout the year, with artists, labels, and genres that have gained prominence in 2016.

You can also play the Artists and Stack Stories playlists on Spotify.

Click through to refresh your memory of 2016, or catch up on what you may have missed this year. There’s always more music to discover.

For the first time since it’s release in 2011, Hype Machine for iOS is available for free in the App Store!

Here’s what’s new in this release:

We’ve added an easier way to read blog posts when playing a track: just swipe up on the artwork to see the list.

There are a few other changes: we’ve removed the offline mode to comply with SoundCloud’s Terms of Service. This update also makes it easier to jump to your synced favorites in the SoundCloud app—tap the button on your profile screen.

Users of Hype Machine’s Android and iOS apps will notice that display ads have started running in their apps.

We are grateful to everybody who’s purchased the apps since we began releasing them in 2011. These sales allowed us to maintain them and develop new features, and we thank you for your support.

We know that it’s frustrating to see ads in an app you’ve paid for, and we wish we could keep the experience ad-free. Unfortunately, as a small team without outside funding, it is no longer possible for us to keep the app running without the revenue that advertising can provide.

Hype Machine has supported itself with advertising since 2005, and with these changes, we hope to keep bringing you new music for many more years to come. Thank you for listening with us.

UPDATE 12/14/16

We considered many options before introducing ads in our apps, and there are many reasons why subscription/donation/IAP offers were not workable for us at the time (for example, supporting two product experiences is tough for a team of three people).

Given the strong show of support for an ad-free solution since the announcement, we are looking into ways people could remove ads in the apps. If you are interested, sign up here.

UPDATE 03/23/17

Ads in our mobile apps have been temporarily disabled.

We started working on Spotify integration earlier this year, and many of you have already linked your accounts. Now you can sync your favorites and play your Hype Machine finds in Spotify!

Connect here and enable Favorites Sync to begin importing your favorites to a private Spotify playlist. New favorites will be synced automatically.

Also follow us on Spotify to hear our Latest, Stack, and Album Premiere playlists, updated with new music daily.

This past Friday, December 2, 2016, we enabled ads in our Android app.

We released Hype Machine for Android in October 2014 as a $3.99 premium app. The revenue from these sales allowed us to publish many updates, including a full rewrite, maintaining the app as the Android platform underwent rapid changes.

Unfortunately, we were not able to generate enough sales to support our small team and continue development. Unlike many other online services, we don’t have outside funding. Hype Machine is a straightforward business – we get revenue from advertising and invest it into making products for music listeners.

We understand that it’s frustrating to have paid for the app and now see ads on your screen. Though the app became free in April, we’ve waited until December to introduce ads as a small sign of our appreciation of your earlier support. Whether you bought the app years ago or months ago, we hope that the music it’s brought into your life has been worth it.

In the coming months, we’ll be working to make sure the app continues to help you discover new music while keeping the ads as unobtrusive as possible.

I wish we could provide an ad-free experience, but we simply would not be able to continue maintaining the app without this revenue.

UPDATE 12/14/16

We considered many options before introducing ads in our apps, and there are many reasons why subscription/donation/IAP offers were not workable for us at the time (for example, supporting two product experiences is tough for a team of three people).

Given the strong show of support for an ad-free solution since the announcement, we are looking into ways people could remove ads in the apps. If you are interested, sign up here.

UPDATE 03/23/17

Ads in our mobile apps have been temporarily disabled.