Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

(photos by Tod Seelie of SUCKA PANTS, see them all here)

Come out to our first event of the year in NYC! Enjoy some much-needed Cuddle Magic, check out Shark?, and get excited for the new album from The Morning Benders.

Best of all, bring your used CDs to swap and donate to Housing Works. That’s right, dig into those shoe boxes under your bed, go into your storage cube, and bring out all those CDs you don’t play anymore, but just couldn’t bear to let go. Ramones anthologies, Slanted and Enchanted, P-Funk compilations, everything you’ve got. We’ll all browse the stacks, evaluate our friends’ taste in music, and realize that yeah, I really should own this album. It’ll be like clicking on someone’s Hype Machine profile and picking up recommendations, except these songs come with artwork.

A ticket for 1 free CD is included with your admission. All proceeds from the show, as well as the unswapped CDs, will be donated to Housing Works’s fight to end homelessness and AIDS.

We love the integration of useful, well-made services on the internet. That’s why we let you scrobble to Last.fm, tweet about your new favorite song, and find show dates right in our sidebar.

Well, we’ve been hosting our radio shows with SoundCloud, and bloggers kept asking, “If you love SoundCloud so much, why don’t you aggregate it?” So now…we can!

Tracks that are shared via embedded SoundCloud players will show up on The Hype Machine so bloggers using this great service don’t need to re-host the files elsewhere. The writers have an easier time sharing the music they’re discussing, artists who upload their songs to SoundCloud have an easier time checking their play counts using SoundCloud’s analytics, and everyone has an even better music experience.

You can read more about this on the SoundCloud blog and watch a video of SoundCloud’s Alex Ljung talking about our partnership here. CNet has more here as well.

Isn’t it beautiful when everything just works together?

Now that all 50 illustrations for the Top 50 artists have been revealed, I thought I would share how we ended up with this gorgeous, inspired gallery of music artwork.

Some of the artists are friends. Some—Khoi Vinh (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart), Mike Perry (Grizzly Bear)—are personal heroes. Hannah Donovan (LCD Soundsystem) masterfully designs our UK bff, Last.fm. The many excellent cartoonists—r stevens (Bloc Party), Jamie McKelvie (La Roux), Dan Meth (Kanye West), Tom Humberstone (Iron & Wine), Julia Scheele (Florence + The Machine), Meredith Gran (The xx)—are a nod to years spent reading webcomics. I met Noah Kalina (The Big Pink) in a Blockles battle, and Josh Gosfield (Bob Dylan) while waiting for Ratatat to go on at The Music Hall of Williamsburg. Yiying Lu (Michael Jackson) made the Twitter fail whale! Deastro’s (Metric) music is frequently discussed on the Hype Machine, but I don’t think that many people knew about his killer collage work (he does his own album art, too).

But most of all, I looked through the wealth of talent being shared on artist communities like Eat, Sleep, Draw, as well as indexhibit and Flickr, and asked artists to recommend friends. The result is a collection of artwork as awesome and diverse as the music in our charts. But I know that everyone has starting doodling something of their own while lost in a song, so share it! Upload it to Flickr, post it on your blog, show us how you interpret your music. Here’s a different take on Vampire Weekend, for starters:

December is always one of my favorite months here at The Hype Machine! Not only do I get all giddy about all the Christmas music that flows through the site but I get to work on one of the most fun projects of the year — the Music Blog Zeitgeist!

To make it the best that it can be, we need your lists. If you are a blogger (even if you’re not listed on The Hype Machine), and have made a Top 10 Albums of 2009 list, head over here and submit a link. Even if you don’t blog, or haven’t made a list, you can still suggest an awesome best-of album list you’ve read.

Submit A Link to Top 10 Albums List
Closes on December 21st
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We will not count any lists you post in the comments. Go to the link to submit your list.

We’re planning on launching on January 4th, with a special treat dropped on New Year’s Eve to get the party started. Have a great holiday with family, friends and good music!