The two main loves of my life are technology & music, and I jump at the rare chance I get to combine them. There are several ways I indulge this, including my ipod, a now dormant obsession with increasingly large/expensive headphones, bigchill.net – and more recently – The Hype Machine.
The Hype Machine is essentially an MP3 blog aggregator with punch. It tracks an obscene number of music-related blogs for mentions of tracks or artists, and then puts them into one place for you to play the songs immediately through the website.
The homepage provides a top 25 ranking of the ‘latest’ results, which generally produces a veritable treasure trove of remixes and unreleased tracks that have been leaked onto the web.
As Hype searches the blogs automatically, it will alert you that there are ‘x’ amount of new listings available to view if you refresh. Accordingly, this is one of the most usable implementations of Semantic thinking I’ve seen in a long time.
As well as the live feed on the homepage, you can view the top 25 songs for each individual blog, the most popular tracks & artists (from the last 3 days to keep things ‘fresh and current’) - or simply enter a specific keyword. Hype even provides news updates, which is quite obviously not its strength – but a nice to have all the same.
Tags courtesy of del.ic.ious and Technorati provide quick links to the larger blogs, which include the beautifully designed Stereogum and highly recommendable Gorilla vs. Bear.
I’ve started using the Hype pop-out player during work hours, but if you don’t want to or just can’t do this, the radio function allows you to listen in to the site’s non-stop stream of songs (which you can also listen to via iTunes, Windows Media Player, or whatever you’re using). And if that’s still not enough, each song is tagged with a link to download where available.
By signing up and creating a profile, the experience becomes all the more personalised. Hype keeps a record of your entire listening history, allows you to ‘watch’ specific blogs or other users you’re interested in, and also bookmark favourites. Plus, there’s a Twitter/Lastfm link up which makes my geeky little heart soar. This is smart, joined-up thinking at its best.
My only sticking point is that every link is a direct follow through, and although I do like that this means you can view the original source – I don’t like having to use my ‘back’ button so much.
Some MP3 bloggers have complained that aggregators like Hype allow users to download music without taking in the entire experience of a music blog. This is fair enough, but as I’ve said above - Hype does give credit where credit’s due. Plus, it has such a huge following that it can only be a positive thing for smaller blogs with relatively low traffic to be linked to the site.
The Hype team has done well to capitalise on its very vocal and passionate following, and the fact that the target audience are more often than not, very creative. Point in case? The merchandise section currently includes a
For those who don’t know, a MIXA is a USB-drive in the shape of a cassette tape, created specifically to make giving a digital mix to someone extra special. If you’d rather design your own, you can use pre-made templates or even pull in photos from Flickr.
To be fair, I could ramble about mix tapes for hours. So I’ll finish off by saying a final well done to Hype (with yet another proof point of its undeniable retro coolness) for linking to ‘Love is a Mix Tape’ by Rob Sheffield. BUY this book - it’s the ultimate coffee-table accessory and conversation starter. Plus, Hype helped me to discover Cassetefrommyex.com – which publicises various mix tape stories from around the world.