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 favoritevideosites, 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.
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 favoritewebprojectsandmagazines 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!
Chris over at dailybeatz has been running a cool music discovery game where he picks a random word, searches for it on the Hype Machine, and finds something great he’s never heard before. We love it, and we’ll be featuring his Hype Machine Hunting posts here so you can join in on the stuff he’s found. Click through to read the full posts on his blog, and if you’ve found something new to love, let him know!
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Since the world is ending via crazy extreme weather of all kinds over the last year or two, including a non-existent winter that I didn’t really miss even though I know it was totally not OK for the circle of life in general, and since it has barely dipped below 90 degrees for a high temp for the past 1-2 months, today’s word is “heat”. Because we haven’t had enough of it lately and we all need a lot more of it in our lives. I bet you were hoping that the word was going to be “air conditioning”, which it was, but there weren’t too many Hype Machine search results for that one, so Heat it is. So let’s take a closer look and listen to some of the rad songs I found.
First up is a neat little instrumental track from German producer Sven Weisse who goes by the name EWOK FUR. “Vhs Sahara Heat” (and lots of his other tracks) have a pretty solid African influence, and he’s giving away all his tunes over at his Bandcamp page. If you dug this track, check out the rest of his tunes and show him some love over at his Facebook page as well.
Normally, the beauty of these posts is that there I end up with 4 or 5 songs that have nothing to do with each other and represent a crazy wide range of sounds. However, in this case, it just so happened that the first two tracks I found and liked both had some sort of tribal influence. “A.M. Heat” by Young Island is sort of the minimalist version of a tribal chant with the barely there music and is perfectly named because it sounds like it could be the soundtrack to one of those shots in a movie where the sun is rising over the African plainsand the heat waves are rising from the baking ground slightly distorting the larger than life bright red orb that is the sun as the silhouette of a gazelle darts across the screen. Pick up Young Island’s iii EP for whatever price you want.
Let’s now take a trip back in time to the wonderful decade that was the 80s courtesy of Japan’s :visited. “Touch Your Heat” features a nostalgic and funky groove that make me long for neon windbreakers and hairspray. Hit up their Bandcamp page for even more tunes inspired by the decade of my birth, which you can even buy on cassette, the official medium of the 80s.
Hype Machine indexes hundreds of music sites and collects their latest posts for easy streaming and discovery. We're here to help you find the best new music first.
