Everyone’s heard of the Hype Machine by now. It’s every music nerd’s favorite web site and it’s hailed as a sort of great big democratic version of MTV with blogs. For those that don’t understand exactly what Hype Machine is it’s the granddaddy of feed sites for MP3 blogs. It crunches entries from the most popular music blogs online and spits out results sorted by the names of the MP3s posted on those blogs.
The search lets you look through thousands of music blogs for the MP3 you want but you can also look at the most popular downloads and what other bloggers are posting and downloading right now. The Zeitgeist section even offers a 50 best artists, songs and albums of the year listing based on compiled downloads and blog reviews.
However the best way to review a site like this is to run a test search. A search for “MGMT remix” brings up 15 pages of results but “Snoop Dogg remix” only brings up 4. A look at the most popular songs also suggests that indie rock and electronic music are much more heavily favored, with other genres taking up a much smaller share of the site. The Hype Machine is an aggregator so it just means there are fewer blogs for other genres participating, but the result is just the same. It’s great if you’re looking to get some electronic or indie music, but for anything else you might be better off elsewhere.
Leave a Reply