Category: New Features

We’ve been Spotify fans since 2008. There was just one office in a busy part of Stockholm filled with crafty developers and dreamers, probably the longest private beta we’ve ever seen, and much-coveted beta invites. It has been fun watching the product turn from daring (“Why would you have an app stream all your music, instead of a website, in 2006?”) to world-changing (“Oh, how can you not?”)

We’ve also been carefully watching the awesome apps that have been popping up in the Spotify App Finder in the past few months. Pretty much all of our favorite web projects and magazines now have an app! We noticed, too, that there hasn’t been a way for music blogs to be visible in this new world of subscription music.

That’s why we are really excited to release the first version of Hype Machine in the Spotify App Store. It’s a fresh way to be introduced to music blogs, all within Spotify, and drawing upon the impressive catalog they have assembled over the years. You can find blogs by genre or by name, and every few days we feature a blog out of the 800+ we monitor to give them additional spotlight.

We figured to start with the first two music blogs that were ever indexed by the Hype Machine back in 2005: Music for Robots (blog id: 1) and Fluxblog (blog id: 2). Thanks, Matthew, Mark & David!

Stay tuned for more featured blogs every few days, and more updates to the app. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

“Now playing” notifications in Chrome: Receive notifications when a new track has started playing on the Hype Machine while you are in a different tab. Click “Allow” when the notification prompt appears in Chrome to start getting these.

Follow blogs faster: You can follow any blog from a track by clicking the + sign next to the blog name:

(You can still visit/follow listings by clicking the blog name or browsing the Blog Directory.)

Fast Forward contest winners: Nancy Tsang and Felix Gürtler made killer remixes of our Fast Forward houses and scored some SOL REPUBLIC headphones. Check out their art here in full resolution.

We love discovering new music (that’s why we started the site, after all). Today, we made a small change to the Popular page to keep everyone finding more new stuff.

Popular keeps track of songs that Hype Machine users are favoriting the most on the site. There are thousands of new reviews posted on music blogs every day, so this is a great filter to see which tracks are catching people’s attention. We used to display this list of 50 songs starting with 1, but now the direction has been reversed, so when you click Popular, you’ll start listening at the 50th most loved track.

Why the change? We wanted to adjust for the cumulative advantage in our charts. Cumulative advantage is the idea that the more popular something is, the more likely we are to choose it, thus making it more popular. (If you’re interested in the research behind this, download “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market” (PDF) by Salganik et al). The lower end of the chart is more fluid and more open to entry, so you’re more likely to keep discovering something good as you listen all the way down to #1.

UPDATE June 30, 2012: We’ve added a few awesome ways to sort the contents of the popular page. Check them out!

UPDATE July  26, 2012: The familiar 1-50 order is back, but the awesome ways of sorting the Popular page remain. Enjoy!