The Hype Machine

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Hype-machine-logo

The Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator that trolls the internet to find out what's hot and to give it attention. They just released their Top 50 Artists, Songs and Albums of 2008. For the last two weeks, I haven't stopped listening to the Top 50 Albums. You can find them here.

While I consider myself a music lover, I also recognize that I have terrible taste in music. I've always gone for what's most accessible, catchy and easy to get listen to. Hype Machine's Top 50 is not made up of that kind of music, not at all. In fact, I've only heard of five of the 50 artists:

  • REM
  • Beck
  • Coldplay
  • Kanye West
  • Lil Wanye

All of the others are completely new to me. I've already found a few new favorites:

  • Frightened Rabbit
  • MGMT
  • Vampire Weekend
  • M83

This music takes some time and commitment to enjoy, but it's well worth it.

Of course, the best part of Hype Machine is the Bloggers that are discovering and writing about the music.

Here are a couple of quotes that will inspire you to listen to the music and appreciate how cool this site is:

  • "...could be the soundtrack to an early morning drive down a country road."
  • "Who'd have thought the classic "American" punk album would be reinvented by a New Jersey punk band rocking out the basement circuit."
  • "Good music to listen to while jumping on a trampoline."
  • "It's dark, creepy and if it happens to be raining where you are, it'll be the perfect soundtrack."
  • "...an album best listened to alone, or at 3am at an open-minded party."
  • "It's the musical equivalent of reading someone else's diary."
  • "It's like watching the sun rise over distant mountaintops, over and over, familiar and captivating all at once."

If you haven't heard of a lot of these bands, I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Newspapers

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Paul Mulshine had a good column in the Wall Street Journal recently defending traditional journalism (newspapers) and criticizing the amateur bloggers that are putting them out of business.

He makes the point that because most bloggers aren't paid for their work they'll be less willing to, say, sit through a three hour school committee meeting and summarize the key points in an easy to read article. So in the future, the casual follower of events at the school will be left unaware of what transpired at the school committee meeting.

I agree with the Mr. Mulshine that, generally speaking, this is scary and would no doubt be a bad thing.

Here's where we differ: it's not going to happen.

Blogs and newspapers have fundamentally identical business models; they generate attention or "eyeballs" that can be monetized in the form of advertising fees. Some also charge nominal access fees though typically this doesn't generate significant revenue relative to ads. On a macro level it is this business model that dictates what does and doesn't get reported or blogged on. To make money, editors and bloggers have to answer a simple question: what will generate attention? If an article on the school committee meeting will generate eyeballs, then it will be reported on, or monetized.

Newspapers are disappearing not because people don't care about the school committee meeting, they're disappearing because people's attention is shifting online. Quickly. And the scalability of online advertising doesn't change the underlying business model.

Because many bloggers are unpaid, amateur, dishonest and uninteresting, Mr. Mulshine assumes that the industry will remain this way. But assuming there's always demand for information from honest, reliable sources, the blogging industry will slowly morph into more of what we know as traditional journalism, only better.

As is true with most industry changes, I think we'll find that the maturation of blogs and web content and the absence of newspapers is good for everyone -- including newspaper reporters.

Bloglines and Bloggers

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One other thought on Bloglines. (the blog aggregator that I plugged in an earlier post). The interesting thing about these services is that they allow a reader to completely avoid the ads served up on blogs. That is, you never actually leave Bloglines' site -- they simply feed you the text from the blogger's most recent post(s). Most of the blogs I read don't actually serve ads. They're simply using the forum as a way to generating interest and eventually selling more of their product or service. But for those bloggers that are generating substantial revenue by serving ads, these services present a big challenge.

Top 1,000 Blogs

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Bloglines tracks the top 1,000 most trafficked blogs on a daily basis.

I know people love these lists but doesn't this conflict with the  spirit of blogs?  To me, the value of blogs is that they give every nobody a voice and provide really targeted and interesting content about really targeted and interesting things.  So if you're a left-handed vegetarian Red Sox fan living in Dubai you have a forum to talk about things that are interesting to you and meet other left-handed vegetarian Red Sox fans living in Dubai

If this is indeed the spirit of blogs, who cares which one gets the most hits?

Why am I blogging?

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Not sure...but here's a thought....

New marketing companies leverage things like blogs, web video, targeted emails, etc.  Old marketing companies -- at least the really big ones -- do dumb things like advertise during the Super Bowl -- the epitome of wasted ad spending.  If there really is something to this new marketing thing, I'm going to bet that, on average, companies that advertise during this year's Super Bowl will see their stock prices decline over the next three years.  I'll list a bunch of these companies the day after the Super Bowl.  It'll be interesting to see if my theory is right...