The Hype Machine is a great music blog aggregator that we’ve somehow failed to write about until now.
The site continuously collects material, including reviews and songs, from the best music blogs on the net. Comparisons can be drawn to Techmeme, which curates a selection of the best tech news articles from the multitude published each day. The Hype Machine does the same for music, saving indie music aficionados the time it would take to scour the web for the hottest new songs.
Not interested on keeping tabs on the music scene on a daily basis? You’re in luck - The Hype Machine just released its 2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist, a collection of the best songs, albums, and bands of 2007. CEO Anthony Volodkin says that the year’s picks were made through extensive analysis of the data collected throughout 2007. The song picks are broken down into months so you can see what was popular in, say, January of last year. The site’s built-in player also lets you play the year’s songs back-to-back and instantaneously.
The Hype Machine was originally started in 2005. The site generates revenue through both on-site advertisements and music sales leads. Version 2 of the site was released just this past fall and featured greater personalization capabilities, such as favoriting and customized feed creation.
Ummm… does Hype Machine have direct deals with the labels/artists? They serve their songs as MP3 and do very little to obfuscate their location on the server. It would probably take me an hour to write a script that would scrape this site and download all of the tracks to my comp. Also, as far as I can tell, all of the files are stored on servers owned by http://www.layeredtech.com/ which makes me believe Hype Machine serves this (illegal?) content directly.
FYI, I found this funny copy on their website:
“Can I download songs from the Hype Machine?
No, the Hype Machine does not offer any tracks for download. We provide a list of tracks that are currently being discussed on blogs, not the files themselves. If you discover a song or artist you like, we encourage you to support them by purchasing their music.”
Maybe they are just oblivious - I’m sure Downtown wouldn’t be to happy:
http://s09a.non-standard.net/a.....s_2847.mp3
what are you trying to accomplish, anon? and does it bother you that the URL you just posted in order to prove your point redirects to the site rather than letting you download said track?
anon: There already is a script running that scrapes the Hype Machine and posts direct mp3 links to del.icio.us, adding last.fm tags while at it: http://del.icio.us/taggedhype
It used to be a decent alternative to browse the site but I’m not sure if streaming still works
@Ryan - that sounds like a personal problem to me - though they may have done something - no matter - the tracks still sit in my disk cache.
What I’m trying to prove is that this site may infringe upon copyright law; something that is not only illegal, but also very uncool. While I think it is important for TC to cover all companies in the tech realm, I think they have an obligation to highlight any potential illegal services that may be provided by the companies they cover.
Although it is possible to scrape all tracks from HypeM and then download them, that is certainly not the aim of the HypeM team. It scrapes content from a massive list of music blogs who post mp3s (some legally and some less so), and only includes music blogs that at least try to promote new artists, bands and the like. It doesn’t aggregate content from album blogs or other websites which are not making any attempt to promote the bands and simply offering up their content for free.
As far as downloading the mp3s from HypeM, yes you could do this through a script or whatever, but the mp3s are available on the blogs that HypeM aggregates anyway, so you don’t need to.
It also is pretty popular amongst the music blogger community (along with elbo.ws) unlike the numerous other mp3 search sites which simply index music from music blogs and then direct link to the files, therefore removing the descriptive and often promotional writing that accompanies the mp3. Without the text, the music blog is just a source of mp3s for free download, but with it they at least try to be good for artists - something which the indie labels tend to understand - but the majors don’t.
I liked this site when i tried it out sometime ago - Nice!
nice one
I’m a big fan of HypeM as well. It’s a site definitely worth checking out.
Yeah great site. I noticed HypeM sometime last year.
Another music discover site I’ve heard thats upcoming is http://www.chartvote.com