Category: New Features

We’ve launched a beautiful new way to experience our featured album premieres. After looking around, we realized there wasn’t anything that properly balanced a clean and simple presentation with the album’s aesthetic. We set out to create an immersive page that isn’t distracting or overloaded with options. A page that won’t slow down your computer.

Drawing inspiration from some of our favorite music apps like Muxtape and This is My Jam, here’s what we came up with:
 

 
Better yet, check out the real thing, and enjoy Natasha Kmeto’s Crisis while you’re at it.

Since making them a function of our site in 2010, we’ve premiered over 100 albums. The last nine have lived in this improved platform, which quietly went live last April with Olafur Arnalds’ For Now I Am Winter. In short time these have amounted to quite the spectrum of sound and color (I’m especially partial to the pastels of Andy Cato’s Times & Places).

It also works on your phone in a browser or our iOS app, so don’t be afraid to open it up!
 

 
What do you think?

Update July 22, 2013: We’ve rebuilt the embeddable players for these premieres too, making them simple and elegant. Here’s one from the Young Hunting album below:
 

While Hype Machine is all about breaking you out of the genres you are comfortable with, we do know that the desire for the guilty pleasures of familiarity exist.

That’s why we’ve made the genre view available on the site some time ago. It uses Last.fm tags for each of the blogged tracks, and organizes them accordingly.

Recently we’ve been testing a new enhancement to this page. It lets you filter the tracks that show up in a given genre by the number of favorites they’ve received. So you can adjust your level of adventurousness here: early listener (between 0 and 25 favorites) or comfortably popular (500+ favorites).

Which one will you choose?

Let us know what you think!

Most of the time, Hype Machine focuses on what’s exciting in the moment. The most blogged artists of the day, the tracks getting the most attention from our members—everything on the site sorted in reverse-chronological order. Things move quickly, and this is the only way to stay on top.

Recently, though, we’ve been thinking more about the past. Reading essays like “Archive Fever” and playing with the amazing TimeHop app got us thinking: What bits of history does Hype Machine data contain? Our yearly Zeitgeists are fun, but they only paint with broad strokes: the top 50 artists, albums and tracks of the year. This approach misses moments and memories, replacing them with larger trends.

Realizing this, we went to work. We recovered over 5 years of weekly Popular charts on the site (that is an immense 272 weeks!), starting from the week of Oct 22 2007, the first full week that the site was live with the then-new favoriting feature (remember that?)

Enjoy!

We’ve been listening to your feedback over the past many months as we’ve been working on the new version of our iPhone app.

Today it’s out. Rewritten and redesigned from scratch, faster and more visual than ever, we are very proud to share it with you. It seems that some of you already like it. Thanks! 🙂

This is a free upgrade if you already have the app, and just $3.99 otherwise. Pick it up!

For those of you on Android, I am also excited to tell you that we are now working on an official app, so stay tuned! But in the meantime, you may find UberHype to be handy.

This week, we are starting to work with not one but two of our favorite teams on the Internet!  In addition to Spotify, we are launching a beta of our partnership with VHX.tv, a beautiful way for artists and filmmakers to distribute their work.  Jamie, Casey & the rest of the team have been crafting amazing video experiences for years, so we are excited to play with their tech in the world of music and blogs.

While listening to our popular page, and watching our favorite video sites, we’ve wondered: what are the most interesting videos on the music blogs we monitor?

So we thought to find out, and we made HMTV: a constantly evolving chart of the most popular videos on music blogs, all wrapped in a slick VHX.tv player, and complete with a lights-out mode.  Have a look!

This is just a first revision of this experience, much more is to come.

As VHX.tv begins to distribute more video by musicians, we are thrilled to support them in developing this new revenue stream for creators.