Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

UPDATE June, 2013: The album premieres have received an amazing overhaul, more info in a newer post here.

Since the fall of 2010, we’ve been running album premieres on Hype Machine almost every week, so I wanted to share all the mysteries about how they work.

They are rather simple: one week before the album’s release, it is streamed in its entirety on the site, and we tell the whole world. We do this via Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and by featuring it in multiple places within the site (link in sidebar of all pages [6M pv/week], and on the artist search page). These premieres are usually embeddable, so you can easily share them – while some sites demand to be the exclusive streaming destination in order to give a new record attention, we know that’s not how the Internet works. The goal behind these is to have as many people find out about the upcoming release as possible.

Typically, these albums are streamed via our partner SoundCloud, which provides the excellent shareable player that we’ve customized (it works on an iPad via HTML5!). But technology is no barrier, as long as we get a working streaming player, we are happy to work with other solutions as well.

We don’t get paid for running these features; they are just artists whose work we enjoy. Here is the eclectic list of the albums we’ve premiered so far. You should check out all of them, they are interesting.

If you are working with an artist on an interesting record, do get in touch with us.