Author: taylor

It’s taken us a week to recover, but we’re finally beginning to feel human again! Thank you to the thousands and thousands of people who made it to our party across the 4 days of SXSW Music. Fifty-six hours of music, over 100 bands+djs, 1000 breakfast tacos, and cases upon cases of Vitamin Water and Heineken later, we’ve definitely left a dent in 6th street.

We’ve thrown a few day or night shows in the past, but this was the largest undertaking we have ever been a part of. A lot of things went right, just a couple of things went wrong, and we learned a whole ton of things. We learned that it is difficult to fill up a 1,500 person capacity during the day, when people are still sleeping off the night before. We learned that events are hard. We learned that it all feels worth it when you’re dancing in the middle of a thousand people at midnight, and everybody’s smiling.

We simply couldn’t have done it without the teamwork of:

Black Box Revue, who invited us to be a part of their Lose Control party this year and brought together an amazing group of people who genuinely care about music. The Windish Agency for helping us out with most of the booking, stage plots and logistics. Beatnik and their team for literally being the backbone that kept the whole party together by providing sound, stage, lighting, and a relentless crew who were in it for the long haul. David Schacher and Beef for providing all kinds of logistical help and being troopers through it all. Emily Moore for the amazing photography. NoMathmatics for the incredible Lose Control art.

And what would a Hype Machine party be without music? Serious thanks to all the bands and management that helped make this happen: 12th Planet, Acrylics, Admiral Radley, Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Auto Body, Baby Monster, Bachelorette, Bang Bang Eche, Baron Von Luxxury, Black Box Revue, Body Language, Casiokids, CFCF, Chiddy Bang, Class Actress, Crystal Fighters, The Crystal Method, Crystal Vision, Dances With White Girls, Database, Delorean, Delta Fiasco, Eclectic Method, Eli Smith, Everything Everything, Fenech-Soler, First Aid Kit, Free Magic, French Horn Rebellion, Grrrl Parts, Grammatics, Hey Champ, Hollywood Holt, Home Video, Hottub, Hussle Club, Javelin, Jen Lasher, Keenhouse, Keepaway, Kids At The Bar, Kill The Noise, Lemonade, LexiconDon, Light Pollution, Lucy and the Popsonics, Male Bonding, Megaphonic Thrift, MeLo-X, Michael Parallax, Mickey Factz, Midnight Conspiracy, MillionYoung, Nice Nice, Nick Catchdubs, Nomathmatics, OK Deejays, Rafter, Royal Bangs, Rural Alberta Advantage, Rye Rye, Samuel, Small Black, Solid Gold, Spleen United, Star Eyes, Steed Lord, Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt, The Death Set, The Hood Internet, The Invisible, The Ruby Suns, Tobacco, Tommie Sunshine, Toro Y Moi, Trash Yourself, Treasure Fingers, Two Fresh, Uffie, VDRK, Villains, Wallpaper, We Are Like The Spider, WhoMadeWho, Woodhands, Yacht, Yes Giantess, You Say Party! We Say Die!, Richard Gear, eLstar, Prepmode, A Ward, Mike Townsend, Kook Hersh, Irresponsible Voltron Crew, Hot Britches, Miguel Angel, DJ Cat NYC, Automatic Panic, Mad Classy Crew.

And our sponsors, Vitamin Water, for keeping everyone hydrated during the day. Heineken, for keeping the bands rockin’. Townie Records, for providing the breakfast tacos each day. SoundCloud for providing the WiFi and HypeCloud player, making it easy for bands to share their music with bloggers. And last but definitely not least, Jakprints for providing the banners and 11,000 RSVP laminates.

More photos of the show from Emily Moore or check out the slideshow:

If you were there, let us know what you thought. If you couldn’t make it, tell us where we should throw the next one!

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).

Now…go fall in love with something new.