Author: taylor

We are all prepared for our annual trek to Austin for the best conference of the year: South by Southwest. This year is extra special because:

We’re Throwing A Party! on March 18th, open to EVERYONE! The Zeitgeist Radio Shows were such a hit, we’ve decided to move forward with a weekly show that highlights the most popular music on the Hype Machine each week. Get all the deets on the The Hype Machine Radio Show Launch Party page and listen to the very first episode, a preview of the bands playing at our party.

We’re On A Panel! Anthony is speaking on a panel this year called Help! My iPod Thinks I’m Emo all about music recommendation systems, the benefits/drawbacks of social vs mechanical picks and more. Should be a lively debate with The Echonest‘s Paul Lamere.

And of course, for all things SXSW, you should check out my side project: sxsw2009.sched.org/ to create a schedule to export to your iCal/iPhone or just print out! This year we’ve also added the ability to get SXSW show recommendations based on your Hype Machine, Last.FM and Grooveshark profiles.

Jim Carini recently shared his incredible idea with us and I had to pass it along. First the background:

According to Newsweek, the struggling US economy is bringing about an upcoming Charity Crisis due to people losing jobs and trying to save more. 2008’s charitable donations are expected to be down $8-10 billion! It’s estimated that 100,000 nonprofits nationwide may be forced to close their doors leaving millions of Americans without a safety net during the worst recession since the great depression.

So Jim mashed up the modern day trend of a Flashmob (big group of people showing up, doing something crazy, then dispersing) with Charitable contributions into something he calls Flashmob4Charity.

The idea: Get 1 million people to each give just $10 to create a war chest
from which the flashmob4charity community makes grants each month to
charities facing financial crisis. And to keep things non-controversial
they¹ll only be concentrating on food, shelter, clothing and medical care
charities.

So head over to Flashmob4Charity and sign up to pledge $10. You’ll only get charged if at least 100,000 people sign up so that it has the intended grand-scale effect. They’ve also done a compilation album with indie label Nettwerk Music Group. Everyone who pledges atleast $10 will get a special link where they can download the album free.

One of my goals this year is to volunteer somewhere. Where do you guys volunteer and do charity work?

Dropbox is a web service that I’ve recently fallen in love with. In the past I’ve used an external hard drive to manually backup my music collection (my most prized possession) about once a month. Then I’d copy all the new files manually over to my laptop to keep things in sync. But no more!

1) I Installed the app on my desktop (PC) and laptop (Mac).
2) I deleted my music collection from my laptop (the lesser up to date version of the two)
3) I setup a shared folder called Music within my Dropbox
4) I moved all my music on my PC into this folder
5) A few days later I had my entire music collection on my PC, Mac, and a copy backed up to the Web!

Best part is there is no more effort after this. When I download a new album from eMusic on my laptop, it instantly copies over to my desktop and visa versa. And the tragic day when both machines die a horrible death, I’ll still have a copy backed up to the web. Viva la Dropbox!

You can try it out with 2GB of storage for free, or pay $10/month for 50GB of storage. To me this is a small price to pay to never have to worry about losing my precious music collection again.

I’d love to hear what you guys think of this or what methods you’ve concocted to keep your treasures safe 🙂

Update: For those who are willing to give up syncing across computers for unlimited storage, check out Backblaze.

UPDATE: The form is has been closed for a few days, stay tuned for the results!

We’ll be launching another fantastic Music Blog Zeitgeist later this month capturing the best artists, albums and songs of 2008 (with a few extra surprises!).

Want to participate? Here’s how:
1) You need to have a blog (doesn’t matter if you aren’t listed on The Hype Machine, we want your opinions too!)
2) You need to post your Top 10 Albums of 2008 list
3) Head over to the Top 10 Album Submission Form and submit your data.

That’s it! You’re votes will be included in and will be presented on our site (check out last year’s listings for an example). Help us spread the word, as the form will close on December 15th.