Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

We’ll be in Stockholm soon and then back in Berlin and we figured it’d be fun to meet other music-obsessed fans for great conversation and company! Please come out and feel free to bring friends. We’ll be in our Hype Machine shirts 🙂

Stockholm, Sweden: Friday, Sept 5 19:00-21:00+ at Södra Teatern Bar on the balcony if there is no rain, inside otherwise.

Berlin, Germany: Wednesday, Sept 10 20:00-22-00+ at Club der Visionäre (pictured below with cool decks)

If you’re want to read more about our trek across Europe, check out our personal blogs: Anthony, Taylor & Scott.

We are testing out a cool new take on the old fashioned chatroom. Thanks to Firef.ly‘s software, the chatroom on HypeM Radio now interacts with the entire page. Just click the “Pop Open Hype Radio Chatroom” link and then move your mouse to where you want to make a comment and begin typing. You will also be able to see everybody else’s cursors moving around the page. You can also customize your avatar so if you come back often, people will know who you are!

The other benefit is if you aren’t interested in chatting, now you don’t have to be bothered with the chatroom. This is a unique take on the typical old chat, so there may be a learning curve. Play around with it for a bit and let us know what you think in the comments!

We just teamed up with the team over at MIXA to release a limited edition MIXA designed by our own Zoya Feldman.

MIXAs are USB-drives cleverly designed like a cassette tape that would make giving a mixtape/muxtape to somebody extra special. If you’d rather design your own, you can use premade templates or even pull in photos from Flickr.

Related & highly recommended reading is Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape, which chronicles his relationship over the years with coordinating mixtapes. It is a quick read and will make you want to revive the ancient art of mixtapes. It also motivated me to go back and listen to Pavement again.

And if you’re looking for inspiration on what to fill your MIXA with check out Cassette From My Ex which is best left to The Guardian to describe:

Before iPods and MP3s there was only one way to impress a new potential love mate – make him or her a C90 mixtape. The consequences of this were perilous: based on your choice of tracks they could conclude that you were a freak, a potential psychopath or merely incompatible due to your obsession with early-80s jazz-funk. Those who hope these errors of judgment are now filed away in some distant landfill will be disturbed to learn that this website serves as a venue where owners of said cassettes can reveal them to the world – and the world can listen in – plus their tales and the artwork. One cover features a cunning lift-up flap that reveals a photograph of the maker’s “beautiful tallywacker”. Classy.

How would you describe The Hype Machine to a friend?

Just some of the more interesting/entertaining responses:

• “one of the coolest sites on the web; a great place to find new music; well designed; easy to use”
• “Most addictive website. Ever. A great place to hunt down new music and make amazing accidental discoveries.”
• “the best web tool to discovering and finding music”
• “THE way to find the music you want and discover the music you didn’t know you wanted.”
• “A great place to hear stuff that’ll be big in six months”
• “Nearly too good to be true, a fool proof weapon when it comes to seeking new music that you’d otherwise not have a chance in hell of hearing.”
• “It’s not trying to hard to be some amazing revolutionary social music experiment, it just is.”
• “a stethoscope on the chest of aural awesomeness.”
• “The Indie Music CNN”
• “God’s gift to the internet”
• “Everything that’s still good about modern music, minus everything MTV turned into.”
• “The Hype Machine is really what makes the tides work. Screw the moon.”
• “Will change the way you discover music…I have said this on many an occasion!”
• “dude, hype machine solvd my problems, physically and emotionally.”
• “like eavesdropping on a million ‘have you heard this?’ conversations between friends”

Our survey is now closed and 1950 of you completed our survey! Thanks to everyone for their participation, it helps us to better understand our audience and how to better cater to you.

First up are the basic demographics like Age, Sex, Education and Income. You can check out the full charts on our Demographics page but I’ll just summarize here. The majority of you are 18-24 years old, male, attending college, make under $20K (most College kids are lucky enough not to have full time jobs!).

How do you discover new music?

The overwhelming majority of you use Online Discovery tools (like Hype Machine or surfing artist pages on MySpace), Music Blogs, and friend + family recommendations to find new music. Half of you use Online Recommendation tools like Last.FM or Pandora as well as print (magazines, newspapers) to find new music.

Some other interesting write-ins for ways you discover music:
# Concerts/Festivals (opening acts etc), DJ Sets, Clubs
# Artists on same record label
# iTunes Networking (when you can see shared music)
# “I ask random people on the street with headphones what they are listening to”
# “3000 of my father’s records (deceased record store owner)”
# Webcasts/Podcasts

Where do you spend your music budget?

The majority of you still spend most of your money to attend concerts. As a believe in the power of live music, this makes me smile. More than half of you still visit record shops and just about half purchase digital music.

Other popular write-ins:
# Music related DVDs/Books
# eBay/Used CDs

How much do you spend on music & music related activites per month?

95% of you regularly spend money on music with 61% of you spending $20 or more on music every month. Compare this to the $3.33 per month spent by the average consumer (source) and you can see that our audience not only is passionate about music, but supports the industry with their dollars.

How many concerts do you attend per month on average?

80% of you attend at least one concert per month, with 20% of you attending about 1 per week. This really highlights the fact that we should make it easier for you to find out about concerts. We recently added SongKick to our previous list of Eventful and Upcoming to provide concert data that you see in the sidebar of an artist page.