Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

2008 PLUG Awards in NYC

The 2008 PLUG Awards in NYC by Stalman

We were nominated for the Best Website at the 2008 PLUG Awards earlier this month. Anthony attended the awards ceremony, sadly not wearing a cat-suit, and said it was good times. We lost to a very worthy competitor that some of you may have heard of and that I still love dearly: Pitchfork Media (anyone else excited about Pitchfork.TV!?)

It was also reassuring that their music awards, like best album, artist, live show etc were very reminescent of our recent Music Blog Zeitgeist.

SXSW 2008 in Austin, Texas
SXSW was incredible. Spending so much time around people that actually create and design things we use and love (and things we didn’t know existed!) was very inspiring.

It doesn’t do it justice, but here are is a short sampling of some of our experiences:

Scott Perry (New Music Tipsheet), Anthony, Rachel (from KCRW), and Taylor at the FADER Fort

Tantek, Hannah and Matt (from Last.FM), Anthony

Scott and Alexis Ohanian (from Reddit) at Gawker Media’s Party

The PureVolume Ranch (aka our home from 12am-4am every night for 10 days)

Graveyard, a rock band from Sweden was my favorite performance of the week. Listen on HypeM

The most web-cred crowd ever at the Emmy The Great Show. Seen in the crowd: Anthony, Taylor, Scott, Robert (from Donewaiting), Frank (from Chromewaves), Matt, Hannah, Jonas and Jeff (Last.FM), and Chirag (from Sched.org/Chime.TV)

Teaser: Look for actual awesome new features later this week 🙂

This past week we’ve been busy fixing lots of things around the site. Here’s what’s up:

– If you use Safari on a PowerPC (and sometimes Intel) Mac, we no longer crash your browser! We are sorry for doing that before; it was totally not personal. Tech details here (Thanks Chirag!)
– If you’re using Safari or IE6, save yourself. But our excellent badge page works as it should again, so go play!
– The site is also a ton faster which we are super-happy about!

Oh yeah, we’ve also re-designed how tracks appear on the site to emphasize what’s important, and make everything easily accessible. Check this out:

Now you’ve got easy links to buy the song you are looking at, or check out who heard or loved this song. Click “Fans”, and it looks like this:

You can switch the display back by clicking “Download” again. Of course you can still favorite the blog that wrote about the track by clicking the heart next to its name — “78s“, in this case.

Enjoy! Would love your comments as always, though if you say mean things, we reserve the right to mock you back.

From their website: “BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES tells the story of American music at this precarious moment. Filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation. The answers they found on this journey–ultimately, the promise that the future holds–are what makes BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES both riveting and exhilarating.”

I just finished watching this for the second time because it’s so great. A thoughtful look into what the music industry is and isn’t from those that have been there. Highly recommended.

The best part? If you sign up for free at bside.com you get 1 free movie credit that you can use to download this. Bside.com: Before The Music Dies

Film Trailer:

If you watch it, I’d love to hear what you think too.

So I made up this game that I’d like to share. Hopefully it’s not just me that is easily amused 🙂

1) Go to Songerize
2) Type a random word into the Song Title box
3) Be entertained for hours

Here are some words to get you started:

• bird
• elephant
• sex
• sandwich
• win

Go try it and share your best finds in the comments!

And we need your help to win! Read below to see how to vote for us.

The PLUG Independent Music Awards have been going on for a few years now. Each fall, an advisory board of ~300 people select nominees in over 30 categories like best Americana Album, Best Record Label, Best Album Packaging, Best Live Act and more. Then the nominees are set loose for the public to pick the winners!

This year we’ve been nominated for the best Music Website Of The Year, which is very exciting. Past winners for this award have gone to the musical juggernauts Pitchfork Media (’05 and ’07) and Myspace (’06). We’ve made a great deal of progress and improvements to our little website over this year and think we have a shot! (Biased? Us?)

So if you enjoy using Hype Machine, please click and vote for us!
You can find us in: Media Categories » General Music » Website Of The Year
** You don’t need to fill out the whole thing, but need to vote in at least 5 categories before submitting your ballot.

Voting is open till February ’08 so you have plenty of time to meet new people, become their friends and then introduce them to Hype! 🙂 If we win, we plan to get drunk, party rockstar style, convince Anthony to wear the cat equivalent of this to the ceremony in March… and document the whole thing!