It’s All Hype
Today I’m writing to let you in on a little tool that I’ve been enjoying for quite some time now. The Hype Machine is a site that I’ve been obsessed with for years. As time has gone by the site has only gotten better, growing and expanding as a tool that allows its users to filter through the web’s musical frontier. The site is an MP3 blog aggregator. It can be best described as a Google search for music. The site has a search engine that combs through the sea of music blogs out on the net and retrieves tracks and posts that relate to the search topic. The site presents these results as a series of blog posts with multiple options specific to the site. These include the option to play the track, to link to the original post and blog, and even links you to venues through which you can purchase the track. The site does not host any of the files itself, most of which violate copyright laws; it simply points you towards the illegally uploaded files. This lets the site function legally even when you’re streaming an unreleased, copyrighted track.
The encouragement to purchase a track that the site gives is never abrasive and never direct, but according to site designer Anthony Volodkin it has garnered the site appreciation from unnamed record labels. I can see why a label would be happy that a site like the Hype Machine was in existence. It brings some sort of sanity to the chaotic jumble of music blogs that have taken the music industry by storm, revolutionizing the way people interact with music.
In the 21 years that I’ve been alive the way people share and listen to music has been constantly evolving. From the cassette playing and recording, to CD making and burning and now MP3 downloading and sharing, the sheer volume of music we are now able to accumulate has vastly grown. I don’t think I would be listening to about 60 percent of the music that I do if I had to buy and store CDs for every album I wanted. I don’t even think of music in terms of albums anymore. I had a conversation about this with my friend over dinner the other night. I think of music in terms of tracks now and will know an artists by a few different tracks that I like and never listen to albums all the way through. The most I get through are the 30-second snippets on iTunes. It’s probably because most albums suck all the way through. Few artists are capable of putting out a product that has the same quality as their main single all the way through.
Now that all the drama about file sharing and the Napster scandal has died down, it seems like the web won and record labels weren’t able to compete with the tidal wave of users that took advantage of the new technology that brought a bit of egalitarianism to the music industry which was turning out huge artists and capitalizing on just a few super stars. I remember my older brothers complaining about the rising prices of albums and how they could barely afford to keep up with all the musicians they loved.
Applications like Napster proved to be messy, with faulty files and viruses running amuck and often wasting a lot of time. The whole bit torrent thing that followed was just way too confusing for me. You need a password and you need to download separate software to then unlock the torrents that you’ve download. I don’t want to touch that hot mess. There’s also something that feels a lot shadier about using a bit torrent site. It’s like there’s a difference between downloading an entire album as opposed to a few select tracks. It still feels like you should be paying for an album, while receiving a single for free seems like it’s helping promote the band more than hurt them.
Sites like MySpace and the Hype Machine have lead to the expansion of the game of music distribution. Today it’s easier than ever to not only create music, but to get people to listen to it through networking and self-promotion (The more shameless the better). You just have to look at the success of artists like Jeffrey Star and Cassie to see how people have been able to utilize the new environment that Web 2.0 has created for budding young artists. Hell, even I have a pop band and MySpace music page with a decent amount of listeners.
