This past week we’ve been busy fixing lots of things around the site. Here’s what’s up:
– If you use Safari on a PowerPC (and sometimes Intel) Mac, we no longer crash your browser! We are sorry for doing that before; it was totally not personal. Tech details here (Thanks Chirag!)
– If you’re using Safari or IE6, save yourself. But our excellent badge page works as it should again, so go play!
– The site is also a ton faster which we are super-happy about!
Oh yeah, we’ve also re-designed how tracks appear on the site to emphasize what’s important, and make everything easily accessible. Check this out:
Now you’ve got easy links to buy the song you are looking at, or check out who heard or loved this song. Click “Fans”, and it looks like this:
You can switch the display back by clicking “Download” again. Of course you can still favorite the blog that wrote about the track by clicking the heart next to its name — “78s“, in this case.
Enjoy! Would love your comments as always, though if you say mean things, we reserve the right to mock you back.
From their website: “BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES tells the story of American music at this precarious moment. Filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation. The answers they found on this journey–ultimately, the promise that the future holds–are what makes BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES both riveting and exhilarating.”
I just finished watching this for the second time because it’s so great. A thoughtful look into what the music industry is and isn’t from those that have been there. Highly recommended.
The best part? If you sign up for free at bside.com you get 1 free movie credit that you can use to download this. Bside.com: Before The Music Dies
Film Trailer:
If you watch it, I’d love to hear what you think too.
We’re really excited to release the 2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist today! It was a lot of work, but it was fun and provides a really interesting overview of the year-in-music through the eyes of bloggers. We hope that you can use it to discover some music you may have missed or overlooked last year.
It’s broken up into 3 features:
The Best 50 Songs: We looked at popularity data broken down by month of what people were clicking and playing the most of. Then we selected the most interesting and unique tracks to represent each month. What you get is a pretty varied overview of the year in singles.
The Best 50 Albums: We collected over 600 top 10 album lists to come up with the best overview of what albums really made an impact this year. We weighted them according to their position using the method Jeff used in last year’s Bloggregate. Using that scoring ( #1=15 points, 2=14, 3=13, 4=12, 5=11, 6=9, 7=8, 8=7, 9=6, 10=5) we ended up with over 1200 albums ranked by popularity. And you can explore them all! Click on the “mentions” link on the album cover to see each individual list mention. Finally, you can download the data used to prepare this list here: raw data, compiled data. This data is distributed under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
The Best 50 Bands: According to how many times their music was posted by the music blogs we index, these are the bands and musicians who really got bloggers excited.
As always, let us know what you think! This is a feature we look forward to continuing annually.
A special shout-out to Jeff from Heart On A Stick for passing the Bloggregate torch to us, and for all his awesome help! Also to Kaela, Michael, and Thomas for coming to our Gainesville album listing party, Eugene, Alex and Evan for helping over the Internets and Blockles breaks for keeping us sane and happy!
So I made up this game that I’d like to share. Hopefully it’s not just me that is easily amused 🙂
1) Go to Songerize
2) Type a random word into the Song Title box
3) Be entertained for hours
Here are some words to get you started:
Go try it and share your best finds in the comments!
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.
Read more about the project • Contact us