Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

Come party with us at SXSW this Friday! Check out Mount Kimbie, Jamie Woon, Jonquil, Clock Opera, and Baths at our After-Hours showcase. It’s going to be awesome.

Info and RSVP here.

The Zeitgeist is here! Our annual roundup of the 50 most-discussed artists, albums, and songs of 2010 launches today. We’ll reveal 10 every day this week, with the Top 10 being released on Friday. Here’s how we made it:

Top 50 Artists: We’ve tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2010 by blogs on The Hype Machine, and invited 50 visual artists to create illustrations for the musicians. You can view them in glorious full-screen resolution while you sample a track from the band. AND! This year, you can send each gorgeous piece of artwork as a postcard to your friends. It’s the closest you can get to hugging a pixel.

Top 50 Albums: We’ve pored over 950 blogger Top 10 lists (the most to date!) and thousands of albums to calculate the final ranking. Grooveshark kindly provided the full album streams, and we’ve used CC-licensed Flickr Photos for the graphics.

Top 50 Songs: We’re excited to present five new mixes of the year’s top songs, created for us by the artists who were dominating the Popular charts in 2010. We’ll also publish the full list of Top 50 tracks on Friday.

As always, the Zeitgeist is one big community effort. Big thanks to all the music bloggers, who make finding the best new music easier; the illustrators and photographers, who make the Zeitgeist look so good; Jeff from Heart On A Stick, who passed the torch a few years back; David from Largehearted Boy, who is the best at collecting best-of lists; Grooveshark (and @bwc), who power the full album streams, SoundCloud, who power the Hype Machine Radio Show; our incredible friends Cain Norris, Michael Bringardner, Lisa Zuniga, Morgan Kelton, and Emma Tangoren for helping us with data slicing and dicing; the entire Hype Machine team, for working through Christmas and New Year’s, every year, to bring you the Zeitgeist. And you: thank you for always looking for new music to fall in love with.

JAN 8 UPDATE: You can now download the entire data set (in a CSV file) we gathered to make the Top 50 albums list this year.  The compiled set [CC License] is a more expanded version of our top 50 list that includes some extras, like the average rank given to an album in each post.  The raw set [CC License] has the list of all blog posts we’ve indexed and the albums they’ve selected.  Enjoy!

Welcome to the updated Hype Machine! We’ve been listening to your feedback, and have made improvements to help you discover new music to fall in love with, and new blogs you can trust. Let’s see what’s new:

Grouped duplicates: We know, you don’t want to hear the same track five times on one page. Now the duplicates are collected in a list, accessible via the “Posted by x blogs” link under each track name. It’s an easy way to see the chronology of a track’s spread on the internet, and see how frequently it’s being discussed.

Search shuffle: Hit the shuffle button next to the search bar to be taken to a random search, or, on a track page, hit the shuffle button to be taken to a random track. Try it!

Sorted search: You can now sort your search results by the number of favorites, or the number of times a track has been blogged.

Most blogged artists: Quickly sample a track from each of the most-blogged artists of the week.

Browse by genre: Serendipitous music discovery is a wonderful thing, and our Latest page has always been great for that. But for those not brave enough to plunge into uncharted music (yet), we’ve added some categories to help you on your way. We use last.fm’s user-generated tags for this, and we think they’ll encourage you to click through into something you weren’t looking for.

Blog directory: Finding a great blog is like making a new friend with an awesome record collection. There are a lot of blogs here, so to make this process less daunting, we’ve organized by last.fm tags from their most recent posts. We’ve also added some special house tags, which you can learn about here.

Friend finder: Check to see which of your Twitter contacts also use The Hype Machine, and quickly start following them.

HTML5 support: Yep. Now you can find new music anywhere you bring your iPad.

We’re excited to share these new features with you. Play around, explore the site, and please do let us know if anything is not working correctly.

We want to make it easier for everyone to explore the wealth of blogs we track here on The Hype Machine. You can use last.fm’s music tags to browse by genres, but our set of meta-tags is here to distinguish blogs through some other meaningful criteria:

Featured: about once a week we spotlight one of the hundreds of blog in our directory .This view shows you the recently featured blogs, they are great!

Something different: music that’s not on the Popular page. If you want to discover music you probably haven’t heard before, try one of these blogs.

Female blogger: there just aren’t enough of them.

Original blogger: bloggers who’ve been with us since 2005. That’s a lifetime in internet years, respect your elders!

Hey, did you eat way too much this Thanksgiving weekend? Come jump it all off at Punk Rope on Monday, December 6th!

Punk Rope is an hour of punk rock recess, with relay races, fitness drills, and plenty of jumping, one Dropkick Murphys song at a time. It’s a ton of fun, and we’ll be there on Monday to work on our box jumps and support our friend Tim Haft’s school fitness initiative, Hopping for Health.

Hopping for Health is a rope-jumping program built with the idea that a play-oriented approach to fitness will get kids to move more. (Nearly 20% of Americans ages 6-19 are obese.) Punk Rope is raising funds to provide free Hopping for Health workshops to schools in need of a PE class that kids want to go to. You can help by buying a Beat Inactivity Senseless raffle ticket for some awesome prizes. We’ll also be raffling off our last limited-edition MIXA in class:

So on December 6, 7PM, tear yourself away from your monitor, and come to the 14th Street Y (344 E. 14th Street, b/w 1st and 2nd Avenues, NYC). Don’t live here? Check out a Punk Rope class near you, or try your luck at a mailable raffle prize (that Bouncing Souls tee is mighty nice!)