Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

The shows from each day are now available for download!

Download them here and listen on those commutes, walks and flights (or just in iTunes while you work)!

Also, a pro tip: If you want to see which blogs featured a given album, just click on the points and other numbers in the top right corner – you will then see thumbnails of each post that listed it with the given rank!

It’s here! Every day this week, we will be revealing more and more of the best music of 2008!

This year, we teamed up with Blogfresh Radio, imeem, Musebin and Tuneup Media to make our overview of music in 2008 even better than last year’s!

Here’s what we have for you:

1) Best 50 Albums of 2008 – We compiled data from over 700 year-end blog posts (many found via Largehearted Boy’s list of lists), analyzed it, and released it into the wild so everyone can see what bloggers were excited about in 2008.  You can listen to full previews of the albums via imeem and browse bite-sized reviews via Musebin. We’ve also shared the data we used to compile this list under a CC license so people can see what we are working with.  Check out last year’s post to see how we arrived at our numbers.

2) Zeitgeist 2008 Radio Show – Blogfresh Radio produced a kickass podcast series featuring the 50 albums in our Zeitgeist.  The shows include interviews with prominent music bloggers and plenty of music, so tune in every day for the next segment as we count down to the best album of 2008.

3) Best 50 Artists – We looked at what bands were written about most frequently in the past year and built a list of the top 50.  Then we mixed it with the most recent tracks for each of those artists to create a vibrant overview of the year in artists.

4) Best 50 Songs – We looked through our users’ favoriting activity and picked out the most loved songs of each month of 2008. We’ll release more data throughout the week, so keep checking back to see if one of your favorite songs made the list.

Enjoy, and let us know what you’re remembering/rediscovering/finding out about for the first time!

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.

Thanks to all the commenters who entered the contest to win a pair of badges to the upcoming Blip Festival in Brooklyn next month!

The winners:
Allanah’s comment got our attention because we’re looking forward to seeing her term paper about the experience 🙂
Andrei’s comment because he seems really passionate and excited about the scene.
Zhang’s comment won because we want him to enjoy some epic chiptunes and the idea of USK waving around a Gameboy like a weapon of mass destruction makes us giggle.

If you’re one of the winners, look for an email soon! The rest of you should still check it out, it’s only $50 for the entire festival or $15/day.