Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

We are looking for awesome people to join our team in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NY to help us build the future of music culture on the web.  Right now, we are looking for two:

Versatile Front-end Developer [UPDATE: filled]

You must have:

• Strong JS (+assorted frameworks)/CSS skills
• An eye for design and attention to the details of UX
• Built something on the web
• Some familiarity with PHP, MySQL, MongoDB a plus
• A serious appreciation of music and culture

Interested?

Email jobs@hypem.com, specifying this position in the subject. Tell us about yourself (in order of importance):

• What have you built?
• What tools do you like?
• What music websites do you like?
• What you find interesting and challenging?
• How do you discover culture?
• What’s the one thing you’d really want to change about our current product?

Send us links to your presence online, resume (if you have one), github account, etc. No attachments!

Visual Web Product Designer [UPDATE: filled]

You must have:

• An eye for design and attention to the details of UX, can turn wireframes into wine (mockups)
• Heavily contributed to something on the web (mobile apps ok too) with an audience
• A serious appreciation of music and culture

Interested?

Email jobs@hypem.com, specifying this position in the subject. Tell us about yourself (in order of importance):

• What have you designed?
• What tools do you like?
• What music websites do you like?
• What you find interesting and challenging?
• How do you discover culture?
• What’s the one thing you’d really want to change about our current product?

Send us links to your presence online, resume (if you have one), dribble account, etc. No attachments!

Special Projects Intern [UPDATE: filled]

You will help us with marketing, events and, well, special projects for at least 3 days a week.  You will be working with many facets of the music and event industry.

Interested?

Email interns@hypem.com and tell us about yourself:

• What music events/concerts/festivals have you worked on?
• What are your favorite ones?
• Why do you want to do this?
• What music websites do you like?

Links to your public presence online are appreciated.

About

Every month, over a million people around the world visit The Hype Machine to discover new music. We are an independent, bootstrapped company based in Brooklyn, NY, operating since April of 2005. More about us here.

We’re always making new stuff, but we frequently forget to tell you about it. Sorry :/ Here’s what we’ve been working on in addition to our site redesign:

Zeitgeist: We’ve meticulously restored all four years of our Zeitgeists (2007-2010). Browse, remind yourself of some great music you may have forgotten, and sign up to be notified when Zeitgeist 2011 launches.

Twitter @s: When you share a track on Twitter, we @ the artists to let them know people are talking about their music. Catch an incorrect Twitter handle? Let us know.

Blog shuffle: One of our members wrote in asking if he could shuffle a blog page, to discover some older tracks he may have missed. Now you can choose “Shuffle” from the drop down menu on every blog listing. Thanks, Dave!

Keyboard shortcuts: A combination of vi/Winamp/arrow shortcuts for navigating the tracks:

Next track: n j b →
Previous track: p k z ←
Play / pause: x, c, spacebar
Stop: v
Heart: l h f

Do you use others? No spacebar for now; too many people use that to scroll.

Bandcamp support: We now pick up Bandcamp track embeds on the blogs in our list.

Tea: Blackcurrant, Earl Grey, peppermint, and lemon ginger have been added to our pantry.

We’ve been having a lot of fun with the site for the past few weeks, with a header paying tribute to Nine Inch Nails, and our earlier Halloween colors, but we’ve also been making some design changes, which you can now see!

The update now live on the site streamlines the site player experience, makes much better use of the space on the site, and will soon make all the different site sections of the site clearer and more accessible. Oh yeah, the site is also wider – we noticed everyone bought those wonderful wide-screen displays, we are now ready to make great use of them.

This is a beta of the update, so stay tuned for more, and give us all the feedback you’ve got.

What do you think?

We make the site to keep everyone finding something new, and today we are testing a new revision to the Latest front page.

Starting now, the front page (also accessible as “Latest“) will only show the most recently posted tracks that have never been blogged about before.   This means that they are as fresh and new as possible, which is what the Latest page is all about.

You can still see the more complete view that includes reposted tracks by clicking “Filter->All Songs”.

Try it out!

We have something new for you today from the Hype Machine Labs. We call it Fast Forward.

Fast Forward is a speedy, immersive way to explore new music being discussed by the world-class blogs we index at The Hype Machine. I mean it: it is really fast.

We’ve been thinking about this idea since SXSW 2009, and after some further inspiration, thought to push this experience further. Fast Forward is like a spinning radio dial across radio stations curated by music bloggers.

From the latest, popular, or genre channels of blogged music, we show you screenshots of related blog posts, while playing short samples of the songs being discussed. Want to read the whole post? Click the big image on your screen. Like the song? Click the heart to add it to your Hype Machine favorites. Use your arrow keys, space bar, or the > button to skip to the next sample.

Now, do this for a few minutes. The favorites you add via Fast Forward won’t be auto-posted to Twitter or scrobbled to Last.fm, if you have that enabled on the Hype Machine, so don’t be afraid to experiment.

Find something new to love? Keep going! There’s always more music up ahead.

This is still an early beta, so we’d love to know what you like, don’t like, or when something is broken. Please write here. Thanks!