Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

Every Hype Machine Zeitgeist tabulates the best music of the year, as decided by music bloggers. This time, we thought it would be interesting to open the voting up to everybody and find out what albums everyone loved in 2011.

We built an album picker stocked with all albums released in 2011 according to Discogs, which over 4300 people used to create and share their top album plaques. The final rank was calculated by assigning points to every album (#1=15 points, 2=14, 3=13, etc), and tallying up the total score. Together with our annual blogger Top 50, the People’s Choice paints a fuller picture of the rich musical landscape of 2011. Explore both lists; you may discover a great album you’ve missed out on the first time around.

The Hype Machine Music Blog Zeitgeist 2011 is ALIVE! We will be revealing 10 of the year’s Top 50 artists and albums every day, with fresh mixes of the Top 50 tracks. Stick around till Monday to find out who made it to the Top 10.

Here’s how this Zeitgeist was created:

Top 50 Artists: We calculated the total number of songs by each band posted in 2011 by blogs listed on the Hype Machine. Nicholas Gurewitch (The Perry Bible Fellowship) illustrated this musical landscape as a big, beautiful poster, and we added interactive map navigation for easy scrolling. Drag around, zoom all the way in, and click artist names to hear tracks by the 50 most-blogged artists of 2011. You can buy the full 18×24″ print here.

Top 50 Albums: We processed more than 400 blogger Top 10 lists and weighed each album according to position for our final list of 50. The maps displayed with each album continue to map the music of 2011.

Some great cartographic resources: Library of Congress Map Division, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at UT Austin, MAPCO

Top 50 Songs: We continued to collaborate with some of the year’s top producers on custom Hype Machine mixes featuring the top tracks of 2011. The full list will be published on Monday.

Thank you, bloggers, for another great year of music discovery. Big thanks to Jeff from Heart On A Stick for starting the Zeitgeist tradition; David from Largehearted Boy for collecting the lists; Cameron, Matt, and Katie for entering the album data; and the entire Hype Machine team for accepting that no one sleeps until the Zeitgeist is live. And thank you, for knowing that there’s always more music out there, and wanting to find it.

Anthony, founder of the Hype Machine here.

Just wanted to say thanks for being with us this year.

It’s our sixth year of running the site, the biggest yet. The list of things that have happened is long, but among them:

• Reached 1 million registered users (that’s you!)
• Made the site play on iPhone, Android & Windows phones (with the help of our awesome developer community)
• Launched a prototype of Fast Forward, an even faster way to dive into something new
• Almost had SBTRKT DJ a party (but the police shut it down)
• Definitely had a blast at our SXSW show with Mount Kimbie, Jamie Woon & more
• Premiered 45 new albums a week before their release
• Received report of a Hype Machine tattoo
• Got an office (for the first time ever!)

It’s refreshing to be around people (you!) that are obsessed with finding something new daily, fighting that seductive feeling of familiarity and laziness.

It’s also really exciting that we are not alone. If you want to listen to new things, there is now a whole world waiting for you. We have 8tracks, This is My Jam, SoundCloud, every music blog out there, and many more places on the web. It’s an exciting time.

So, thanks for being with us, we like it. Stay tuned for Zeitgeist 2011 on January 2nd!

Happy Holidays,

Anthony & Team Hype Machine.

We are looking for awesome people to join our team in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NY to help us build the future of music culture on the web.  Right now, we are looking for two:

Versatile Front-end Developer [UPDATE: filled]

You must have:

• Strong JS (+assorted frameworks)/CSS skills
• An eye for design and attention to the details of UX
• Built something on the web
• Some familiarity with PHP, MySQL, MongoDB a plus
• A serious appreciation of music and culture

Interested?

Email jobs@hypem.com, specifying this position in the subject. Tell us about yourself (in order of importance):

• What have you built?
• What tools do you like?
• What music websites do you like?
• What you find interesting and challenging?
• How do you discover culture?
• What’s the one thing you’d really want to change about our current product?

Send us links to your presence online, resume (if you have one), github account, etc. No attachments!

Visual Web Product Designer [UPDATE: filled]

You must have:

• An eye for design and attention to the details of UX, can turn wireframes into wine (mockups)
• Heavily contributed to something on the web (mobile apps ok too) with an audience
• A serious appreciation of music and culture

Interested?

Email jobs@hypem.com, specifying this position in the subject. Tell us about yourself (in order of importance):

• What have you designed?
• What tools do you like?
• What music websites do you like?
• What you find interesting and challenging?
• How do you discover culture?
• What’s the one thing you’d really want to change about our current product?

Send us links to your presence online, resume (if you have one), dribble account, etc. No attachments!

Special Projects Intern [UPDATE: filled]

You will help us with marketing, events and, well, special projects for at least 3 days a week.  You will be working with many facets of the music and event industry.

Interested?

Email interns@hypem.com and tell us about yourself:

• What music events/concerts/festivals have you worked on?
• What are your favorite ones?
• Why do you want to do this?
• What music websites do you like?

Links to your public presence online are appreciated.

About

Every month, over a million people around the world visit The Hype Machine to discover new music. We are an independent, bootstrapped company based in Brooklyn, NY, operating since April of 2005. More about us here.

We’re always making new stuff, but we frequently forget to tell you about it. Sorry :/ Here’s what we’ve been working on in addition to our site redesign:

Zeitgeist: We’ve meticulously restored all four years of our Zeitgeists (2007-2010). Browse, remind yourself of some great music you may have forgotten, and sign up to be notified when Zeitgeist 2011 launches.

Twitter @s: When you share a track on Twitter, we @ the artists to let them know people are talking about their music. Catch an incorrect Twitter handle? Let us know.

Blog shuffle: One of our members wrote in asking if he could shuffle a blog page, to discover some older tracks he may have missed. Now you can choose “Shuffle” from the drop down menu on every blog listing. Thanks, Dave!

Keyboard shortcuts: A combination of vi/Winamp/arrow shortcuts for navigating the tracks:

Next track: n j b →
Previous track: p k z ←
Play / pause: x, c, spacebar
Stop: v
Heart: l h f

Do you use others? No spacebar for now; too many people use that to scroll.

Bandcamp support: We now pick up Bandcamp track embeds on the blogs in our list.

Tea: Blackcurrant, Earl Grey, peppermint, and lemon ginger have been added to our pantry.