The Hype Machine

"Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up here."

The Hype Machine is a must-visit-daily website, if you want to keep on top of your music game. Every day new bands are emerging, and new music is being written. And we all know that deep down, being the first to find a band/artist and spread it around feels pretty legit. It makes you feel like you are somehow part of that band, even though you have literally nothing to do with them. So, you may be asking, "Crane, how can I be the first to hear the music?" The Hype Machine, my friends. People like TSO and me, run music blogs from all over the world. Allow them to sift through the massive amounts of music out there for you. The Hype Machine is an aggregate of all music blogs, posting the exact same posts as the blogs themselves in real time. Almost all the new posts have download links for the individual songs in the post.

Some cool features of the site are "popular," "radio," "most blogged artists," and their annual "zeitgeist." If you navigate over to the "popular" tab of The Hype Machine, it will show you songs from the last three days with the most favorites. It's a list of user-voted top music in the world, unbiased by big record labels. What I like to do is go to the popular tab every other day or so, and go through the top twenty-five songs for that day. With a simple add-on to Firefox, FlashGot, you can click the little play button next to songs on The Hype Machine, then click the FlashGot icon on your browser to download all the songs that you have streamed, even if you didn't listen through the whole song. The "radio" section includes a stream of popular and recent songs posted by blogs, and a weekly radio show run by the website featuring the hottest music. Most blogged artists is a simple feature on The Hype Machine's main page that is a list of that weeks top artists to give you a better idea of new bands to follow, without being muddled by new singles. At the end of every year, The Hype Machine produces their Zeitgeist, which means "spirit of the time." It's a list of the year's top albums, artists, and songs. Really helpful for catching up on good music after a busy year of school and whatnot.

If you're not one for downloading music in an extralegal fashion, you can always listen to the songs and artists directly off of The Hype Machine. They have a fantastic flash player at the bottom of their page that has a seamless method of playing music off the website while switching pages, much like Facebook chat.

One final thing I like about The Hype Machine is that it provides you with otherwise difficult to find remixes of tons of songs. Remixes can bring life back to a song that you may find boring after too many listens or make songs that don't fulfill their full potential great. Check this website out, I highly encourage it. The Hype Machine.

Continue having a great summer,

The Crane