Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

Thanks again everyone for all your feedback. Angry, happy or both, we love it.

We’ve just updated the site with a new popup player on every page of the site that plays the whole page through.

Here are the links that open it up:

Also in this update, you can now see how many people are watching any blog we track, like this: http://hypem.com/list/1/

Would love to hear what you think!

Anthony, Zoya, Scott and I are reading everything you are saying. We definitely appreciate all the constructive feedback regarding the music player. Don’t worry, we love and use Hype as much as all of you so we totally understand how you feel.

We will post updates as often as we can while we work on the feedback you all are giving us. In the meantime, you guys should check out some of the new user features. We want to hear what you think about stuff like favoriting songs and creating a custom stream of new music (aka Love Feed) updated constantly. Both are on your profile page that you can take advantage of even as a guest.

We’ve blocked lolcatz on all our machines till the new Hype is setup just the way you want it. If you know us personally, you will know this won’t be easy 🙂

We hear you. Here is what happened to the Flash player:

While we were designing the new site, our biggest goal was to showcase the content bloggers are creating to make music discovery more engaging. This is why we get up in the morning and work on Hype Machine.

We looked at our flash player and saw that it was great at:

– Playing music, skipping tracks.

We also saw that it really sucked at:

– Displaying clearly visible links to blogs, and buying relevant music.
– Showing any content at all from the matching blog post. In fact, that just wasn’t in the player.

Given what we are up to, this player doesn’t work. It was the best we could do at the moment, but did not fully address what we are out to do.

Right now, we also see that the way audio works on the current site has problems:

– Songs don’t reliably continue playing once the previous one is done
– Not always clear what song is playing

We are working on a way to address these issues and do both: have an amazing listening experience and showcase what bloggers are writing.

Don’t stop with your feedback.

Thanks for everyone’s comments in the preceding post. We’ve been reading and discussing them plenty, stay tuned.

While we tweak the current site, here is:

What’s New in this version of Hype Machine

– Favorite anything on the site. Tracks, blogs, searches or other users. Just click on the hearts where they appear and they will immediately be added to your dashboard page.

– Dashboard page (looks like http://hypem.com/yourusername, here’s mine, Taylor’s, Scott’s and Zoya’s): shows your favorite tracks, and blogs, searches, people you are watching and who is watching you. You can also share this page with your friends – give them the URL and they can see what you’ve been enjoying on the site.

– Love feed: a customized feed assembled from your favorite blogs, searches, and favorites of people you’ve found interesting on the site.

– Twitter integration: as you favorite anything on the site, you can share this with the world via Twitter. You can see what it looks like here: http://twitter.com/sights_set

– Built-in Video Search: See relevant video right in any search page, powered by Chime.tv

– DRM-Free Music Store Search: as you search the site, we search a long list of digital music stores that carry MP3s or DRM-Free AAC files. Then you can see what we found right on top of the page. (Note: we are currently adjusting this feature to include more services and operate faster)

– In-page audio player: you can preview any track that has the familiar play triangle next to a heart. The track plays while you are on that page.

What’s NOT new

With the new look and all these tools, many things also stayed the same.

– We keep track of the best music blogs on the web. Still doing that, and now we expose even more context for all the amazing content we find. After all, the reason any music matters on the Hype Machine is because writers around the world have found it fascinating enough to write about.

– Live Internet radio powered by music blogs. We assemble the most popular, interesting tracks being blogged around the world into one eclectic radio stream.

– Instant search: As you are exploring the universe of music blogs, you can quickly see all activity around any band that comes to mind.

Thanks again for all your feedback, and welcome to the new Hype Machine.

Long story short: we wanted to punctuate the release of the New Hype Machine with something unusual.  Inviting 10,000 strangers to watch that moment together fit the bill. We spent lots of long nights looking over all the details and getting the service ready for you.  And so we wanted everyone to know about it and see it. So that’s what we were thinking.

To those who joined us and waited – THANK YOU.  At 5:23PM EST we had a whopping 3888 people watching.  Thank you for putting up with us, even while the service was not available.

Looking over the data now, we’d hit 10,000 if we keep the site closed for 39 more hours.  That, however, is simply too long to wait.  And so:

Welcome to the New Hype Machine.  We can’t wait to hear what you think!
Go Play!