Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

If it’s mid-April, we may have finally gotten enough sleep to tell you about our massive party at SXSW.

Hype Machine’s Hype Hotel, presented by Taco Bell, returned to Austin for another 5 days and nights of the best music being covered on music blogs. Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs. Bear, Stereogum, I Guess I’m Floating, YVYNYL, Yours Truly and PORTALS  joined us to curate night and day parties, championing great artists just like they do every day on their sites.
 

 
This year’s Hotel was the largest we’d ever built, with 1000+ capacity, even better sound, and even more lights. (Check out our making-of album here.) And once the doors opened, it filled up with all the unquantifiable stuff that makes live music so exciting—exuberant crowds, dancing (with friends), dancing (with strangers), boosting up a crowd surfer, and watching the band play that song, the one you first heard on the Hype Machine a month ago, that is now in your Obsessions list. It’s an incredible experience, and if you were at the Hotel this year, we’re sure you have some of your own favorite moments. If you didn’t make it, though, our partners Baebelmusic are putting up videos of full Hype Hotel sets every week—click here to watch.

None of this would have been possible without our presenting sponsor, Taco Bell, and their Feed The Beat program. Their support was essential in pulling off this gigantic endeavor, and our Hotel guests were especially grateful for all the free Doritos Locos Tacos and bean burritos they could eat (30,000 accounted for!) And of course, nobody left thirsty thanks to Miller, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, and Cabin Fever Whisky. Another big thanks to Jakprints, Baeblemusic, High End Systems, and Orange Amps for helping us make the event so great.

Were you there? Were you skanking to The Specials? Did you jump on stage and dance with !!!? Are you the guy that passed me a joint during Toro Y Moi? Tell us, we love hearing your stories.

To jog your memories, browse the gallery from our Lensley videobooth. Thank you for coming, and we’ll see you again next year!

We had such a blast at Hype Hotel last year, that we just had to outdo ourselves this time! Hype Hotel 2013 will be in a larger space, so all the great things about the event will be even greater.

Hype Hotel, presented by Taco Bell in support of its Feed The Beat program, is eight days of music, drinks, and tacos, March 9-16, 2013 in Austin, TX at Whitley (3rd & San Jacinto).

Lineups are curated by the Hype Machine team and the excellent Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs. Bear, Stereogum, I Guess I’m Floating, YVYNYL, Yours Truly and PORTALS. The event recreates the Hype Machine experience in real life, so that you can get away from listening to all this music on your phones, and come see it live. It’s better, really.

Passion Pit will also perform at Hype Hotel on March 11 with fellow Feed the Beat artist Wildcat! Wildcat! as part of Taco Bell’s first-of-its-kind rockumentary film – which will be created by fans online or at the show using #FeedtheBeat, and through a customizable live stream on FeedTheBeat.com.

A huge thanks to our presenting sponsor, Taco Bell, and sponsors: Miller, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Jakprints, Baeblemusic, High End Systems, Orange Amps, Lensley Automatic, and Cabin Fever Whisky.

RSVP is now open for free day shows. Night shows are open to SXSW badges/wristbands.

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!

2012 is almost over and I just wanted to say thanks for finding new music with us this year.

We spend all of our time building things for music seekers, and it is thrilling to see you use and respond to what we’ve made.

It’s our seventh year (an eternity on the Internet), and we did a lot of new things.

Some of them were:

• Launched a brand new version of our iPhone app. The app was rewritten & redesigned from scratch and the difference is huge. It’s a free upgrade if you already have it, of course. Read what people said about it.
• Ran a 5 day (!) party at SXSW 2012 in Austin with 60 bands curated by 9 blogs, 18,000 free tacos from Taco Bell, 1800 bottles of vodka, 1200 cases of beer and 3 massage chairs. We lived, and people had fun.
• Made it easy to navigate remixes across the site and filter them out from the Popular page and the newest posts. Or, you can listen to ONLY remixes too, of course.
• Made a beautiful summary of the best music in 2012 with our yearly Zeitgeist, and had the amazing community on Tumblr vote for their favorite albums by reblogging and liking animated GIFs.
• Threw a few great shows at Brooklyn Bowl in NYC throughout the year, and music blogger meetups in Brighton, UK during the Great Escape, and Berlin, Germany during Berlin Music Week.
• Had a huge stage at Governor’s Ball, a perfectly executed music festival at Randall’s Island in NYC. At our stage, we had Built to Spill, Fiona Apple, Modest Mouse, Major Lazer, Chromeo, Passion Pit and many more. My diet for the weekend consisted exclusively of tiny cupcakes.
• Visited the BBC to talk about the most blogged artists of the year.
• Launched a Spotify app to introduce more people to music blogs
• Experimented with a way to watch all the new videos on music blogs with HMTV. Try it!
• Premiered 48 new albums a week before their release, made 12 episodes of our Music Blog Radio Show. Listen, if you missed out!
• Protested crazy legislation that was going to limit expression on the web (SOPA)
• Moved into The Secret Clubhouse – an awesome coworking space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We finally feel at home.
• Made countless improvements to the web version of the site. Everything is clearer, easier to find and faster.

It is a pleasure to be around people (you!) who are opening their minds to new things and fighting that lazy, seductive feeling of familiarity.

While many parts of the web work diligently to bring you stuff that’s catered to your existing taste (hint: it actually limits you!), we still think life is brighter when you step outside of your group of friends, the things that are comfortable to you, and jump into something entirely new.

This is also true outside of music on the web, so don’t just stop there. Take an active approach to discovering what you enjoy in the world.

See you next year, we have quite a bit in store.

Anthony & Team Hype Machine