Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

UPDATE 8/12 8:00AM ET: The shirts are now sold out.

We’ve got shirts again! Exactly 129 of them, lovingly designed by Zoya and printed on fine American Apparel stock.

Here’s how they look:

If you aren’t sure about the right time to order, you can always see how many are left right on the Hype Machine homepage, and decide then.

Get one!

By the way, Zoya is also available for graphics/print jobs. She loves making t-shirts, but she’ll design a mean 3-color disc for your band, too.

One of the best ways I’ve found to see what purpose your site is serving is to ask people how they would describe it to their friends. Often this is different than how a CEO or marketing guy will describe their company. Here’s a sampling of some of the descriptions our respondents gave:

* A site that gives you a quick indication of what other people are currently listening to and an easy approach to online music blogs.
* The Hype Machine is a great site for finding new music and listening to music from artists you might have heard of but haven’t actually heard yet. And since it’s coming from the best music blogs, you can find out about new artists much quicker than via traditional methods. You can also find b-sides, rare tracks, and live cuts that you might not find anywhere else.
* It’s an awesome place to find music that doesn’t suck.
* The Hype Machine is the best way to discover new music as opposed to radio and music television stations. Whereas those two areas are now interested in telling their audience what to listen to, the Hype Machine lets you decide.
* The ultimate means of finding music by independent artists posted in the blogosphere.
* It’s like quality radio used to be, with an awesome request line.

My personal favorite (and winner of best metaphor):
* Looking for music on Hype Machine is like walking through a field of mixed berry bushes. They compile all the songs featured on blogs and lay them all out for you to pick through. Sometimes you can stroll through and find something delicious. And if you’re looking for a specific song or artist, chances are someone’s blogged about them, and it’s there. It’s awesome.

Some of the ones that made us laugh (and maybe a little confused):
* The Pot Of Gold At The End Of A Rainbow
* It is where the music is born, so if you want a first glimpse, you know where I am.
* A cornucopia of LOVE for the adventurous.
* Pirate ship with jet engines… In a Robin Hood kinda way.

Awesome CYHSY photo by Flickr user Tonie.

Total Responses: 1274

Total Responses: 1430

Digital Music: 36% of you spend money on subscription services like Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music, and eMusic or on track/album downloads from iTunes and Amie Street.

Mail Order: 22% of you spend money on ordering cds/vinyl online from retailers like Amazon and CD Baby.

Record Shops: Almost half of you spend money at physical music shops. What’s really interesting here is that more people who visit our site are spending money on CDs and records than are purchasing digital music. One of the reasons, I hypothesize, would be that people that use Hype Machine are more pro-active about finding/discovering new music than the average “music is just background noise” listener. These people are also generally the people who take in music as an entire experience, whether that includes physically putting on the record (and collecting releases) or by wanting to enjoy the CD in its entirety with its included artwork/packaging.

Random funny response: “Other: internet/power bills”

Another interesting finding to note here is from the Entertainment Media Research’s recent Digital Music Survey (PDF). In researching the impact of downloading on CD Purchasing, they found that downloading had no effect on 45% of people and 10% of people bought “more” or “many more” CDs as a result. On the flip side, 44% of people bought fewer or stopped purchasing CDs altogether.

Concert Tickets: The most popular place to spend your music budget is on live music. One funny anecdote I have about this is a music industry conference Anthony and I were at a few months ago. All the bigwigs were scrambling and worried about the state of declining CD sales and if digital music would offset that. The only person not shivering in his boots? The concert ticketing exec (either TM or LiveNation, I forget) who proudly proclaimed that you can’t “steal” a live experience and that all this digital activity was reinvigorating the concert industry like crazy. With free tools like Hype Machine and Last.fm helping to expose new music to listeners everyday, more and more people are getting out of the house and supporting the artists at shows. I’m a big fan of this kind of support as I feel that bands get much more money from me from a show these days than from your iTunes purchase.

Concert Merch: While this may be the smallest area that people allocate their music budgets to, I believe it has the highest profit margins for bands these days. Sure, you can go buy the CD for a dollar cheaper on Amazon, but getting it after the show, while actually talking to the band, is much more exciting for both parties and puts more money back into their pockets. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both ticketing and merch up a lot by this time next year.

We posed the question, “How do you discover music?” to see the various and popular ways you discover new music besides just on The Hype Machine. You were allowed to check as many ways as you used.

Total Responses: 1430

Friends: The grandaddy of music discovery, friends will always be an influential source of your musical tastes. Last.FM takes this to the next level by letting you snoop on what your friends are listening to right now without them even saying anything. While I personally find this really fun, the best signal-to-noise ratio will usually be when your friends play an album so much that they make a verbal recommendation to you.

Print: Over half of you still look to print for music recommendations. Things like the NY Times Music Section, Spin, and Paste Magazine still have the worthwhile writing and critics to pick some winners. Or maybe you need something to read on the plane.

Online Editorial: Unsurprisingly, the most popular way for our visitors to discover new music is via website reviews and blogs. And really, what can compete? With the possibility to find new sources of music your friends (or entire town) hasn’t heard of and simply explore more music than could ever fit in a magazine or between your friends ears, blogs are the most comprehensive.

Online Mechanical: This included things like Pandora, Last.FM’s automatic recommendations, MyStrands and other automatic and personalized recommendations scored the lowest. My theory is because this is the newest way of music discovery only really coming to fruition in the last 5 years:
A) people are still getting used to trusting computer algorithms for recommendations on something so emotional/personal (something that blogs/friends obviously have)
B) algorithms for recommendations haven’t hit the tipping point of getting more rights than wrongs.

Other ways people mentioned they discover new music: (write-ins)
* Television show soundtracks (see TuneFind and rejoice)
* Looking at the Top 8 friends on myspace pages of bands I love (usually will be bands they love)
* Terrestrial Radio (in pure oversight, we forgot to even include Radio in this question. people still listen to radio?)
* Music Comes To Me Group: It was really interesting to read the write-in responses of music bloggers and people in the music biz (dj,s booking agents etc) who have new music hunt them down in the form of cds/mp3s/email promos. Speaking from experience, the signal-to-noise ratio here is abnormally high as you can guess.

More to come!

Now that our survey is over, I’m going to start sharing our findings. First up is who actually uses The Hype Machine, and then will come what your music spending habits are like, what you think of Hype and how we can improve (you didn’t think we were done did you?)

Total Responses: 1764

One interesting tidbit: Anthony, Scott & I are pretty much living examples of our most popular demographic 🙂