Through a friend of a friend I got some feedback on my first interview with Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin suggesting that it was a little ‘lite and fluffy’.
True enough.
No-one thinks my interviews are insightful.
The feedback also yearned for Anthony discuss the impact of the Hype Machine on the way people find and listen to music. There’s an argument to be made that the Hype Machine has turned the mp3 into something people horde for the sake of hording which means that rather than truly enjoying it and savouring it as the artist might have wished/intended, they just collect as much as they can.
I don’t agree with that argument but I thought I’d leave it to Anthony to respond.
Anthony’s Response:
I don’t think Hype Machine is as important of a force behind these changes as people make out. A similar set of comments were once published at Pretty Much Amazing. They have it wrong though I do like that they referenced a Guardian article that also has it wrong to back it all up.
The issues with collecting files have been around long before us and are central to the whole issue of music on the web.
In a bunch of ways, it is the currency, it’s what makes listening possible. We can’t make this reality go away. That said, we focus as little on files as possible given our project.
You probably noticed that we don’t show bit rates, file sizes, lengths, and other pieces of data that many search-like tools have.
This is all very intentional, and the idea is to emphasize the context of why these tracks were posted. This is also why we switched our format to include an image and a bit of text from the original post.
At the time a bunch of users hated the change and said that they’ll go listen to music on imeem instead (that’s fine and I hope they went and did it, we don’t want them).
We want to get more people discovering blogs, more people becoming aware that music blogs exist and why they matter. If we were thinking differently, the Hype Machine would have been a raw file index of the tracks people posted with nothing else.
We probably did play a role in the growth and attention that music blogs have received. This changes the dynamics of many things, as bigger audiences tempt the wrong people to do the wrong things (post link bait, poor quality content but in large quantity etc).
This is why we also manually approve blogs. I think even though the space is changing, it is possible to preserve the things that got me into it in the first place - the geniune excitement that still drives a ton of the music blog posts out there.
Word.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Jonno S 04.08.09 at 7:29 pm
That was actually really interesting. I think it’s one of those debates that will take a while to fully tease out, but I recommend hypem to all my music students and they love it. Anthony, we followed your rules for blog application like, a month ago but never heard back? I assume your people will eventually call my people
Keep up the good work.
Andy 04.15.09 at 11:45 am
file hording has become music currency for the mainstream music consumer who has no taste but sees quantity as a mark of the length of their manhood.
Accessing new music from new platforms is very exciting to us true music lovers. Does censoring blogs/ forums/ etc a new form of music A&R for community platforms?
My conundrum is how does the digital music world translate into adding value to the music chain? Music must obtain funding to survive. If record labels recognised this space 10 years ago it would be a different world where they would not be reactive to the space. Is that a good thing?
Nick 04.15.09 at 3:46 pm
@Jonno S - Where are you teaching, and who are your students? Jonno - to read about Hype Machine’s blog integrity/screening - see here: http://blog.hypem.com/2009/02/how-we-pick-blogs/
@Andy - My take: we access music in different ways. I go to Hype Machine or wearehunted.com, not record stores. Do I buy? Not as much as I used to. Do I download? Of course.