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.

It’s not every day that we get a photo like this with the brief note, “My tattoo.” But there it is! The Hype Machine phonograph and speech bubble, looking glorious.

We’re beyond flattered. Thanks, Brett (& the tattoo artist, Alex) <3

Come party with us at SXSW this Friday! Check out Mount Kimbie, Jamie Woon, Jonquil, Clock Opera, and Baths at our After-Hours showcase. It’s going to be awesome.

Info and RSVP here.

The Zeitgeist is here! Our annual roundup of the 50 most-discussed artists, albums, and songs of 2010 launches today. We’ll reveal 10 every day this week, with the Top 10 being released on Friday. Here’s how we made it:

Top 50 Artists: We’ve tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2010 by blogs on The Hype Machine, and invited 50 visual artists to create illustrations for the musicians. You can view them in glorious full-screen resolution while you sample a track from the band. AND! This year, you can send each gorgeous piece of artwork as a postcard to your friends. It’s the closest you can get to hugging a pixel.

Top 50 Albums: We’ve pored over 950 blogger Top 10 lists (the most to date!) and thousands of albums to calculate the final ranking. Grooveshark kindly provided the full album streams, and we’ve used CC-licensed Flickr Photos for the graphics.

Top 50 Songs: We’re excited to present five new mixes of the year’s top songs, created for us by the artists who were dominating the Popular charts in 2010. We’ll also publish the full list of Top 50 tracks on Friday.

As always, the Zeitgeist is one big community effort. Big thanks to all the music bloggers, who make finding the best new music easier; the illustrators and photographers, who make the Zeitgeist look so good; Jeff from Heart On A Stick, who passed the torch a few years back; David from Largehearted Boy, who is the best at collecting best-of lists; Grooveshark (and @bwc), who power the full album streams, SoundCloud, who power the Hype Machine Radio Show; our incredible friends Cain Norris, Michael Bringardner, Lisa Zuniga, Morgan Kelton, and Emma Tangoren for helping us with data slicing and dicing; the entire Hype Machine team, for working through Christmas and New Year’s, every year, to bring you the Zeitgeist. And you: thank you for always looking for new music to fall in love with.

JAN 8 UPDATE: You can now download the entire data set (in a CSV file) we gathered to make the Top 50 albums list this year.  The compiled set [CC License] is a more expanded version of our top 50 list that includes some extras, like the average rank given to an album in each post.  The raw set [CC License] has the list of all blog posts we’ve indexed and the albums they’ve selected.  Enjoy!

Welcome to the updated Hype Machine! We’ve been listening to your feedback, and have made improvements to help you discover new music to fall in love with, and new blogs you can trust. Let’s see what’s new:

Grouped duplicates: We know, you don’t want to hear the same track five times on one page. Now the duplicates are collected in a list, accessible via the “Posted by x blogs” link under each track name. It’s an easy way to see the chronology of a track’s spread on the internet, and see how frequently it’s being discussed.

Search shuffle: Hit the shuffle button next to the search bar to be taken to a random search, or, on a track page, hit the shuffle button to be taken to a random track. Try it!

Sorted search: You can now sort your search results by the number of favorites, or the number of times a track has been blogged.

Most blogged artists: Quickly sample a track from each of the most-blogged artists of the week.

Browse by genre: Serendipitous music discovery is a wonderful thing, and our Latest page has always been great for that. But for those not brave enough to plunge into uncharted music (yet), we’ve added some categories to help you on your way. We use last.fm’s user-generated tags for this, and we think they’ll encourage you to click through into something you weren’t looking for.

Blog directory: Finding a great blog is like making a new friend with an awesome record collection. There are a lot of blogs here, so to make this process less daunting, we’ve organized by last.fm tags from their most recent posts. We’ve also added some special house tags, which you can learn about here.

Friend finder: Check to see which of your Twitter contacts also use The Hype Machine, and quickly start following them.

HTML5 support: Yep. Now you can find new music anywhere you bring your iPad.

We’re excited to share these new features with you. Play around, explore the site, and please do let us know if anything is not working correctly.