The Hype Machine – What’s all the Hype About????

Created by Anthony Volodkin in 2005 ‘The Hype Machine’ has proved a huge success by providing a wonderful tool for music enthusiasts and web surfers to explore the blogosphere for music related content. His work has recently won Mashup Camp 3’s award, and has attracted a lot of attention from many web developers as well as music lovers. So what’s it all about?

The Hype Machine is an online aggregator of music blog posts from the extremely large blogosphere of the web. With links to Amazon sales data and upcoming gigs, and an integrated Flash music player to output the MP3 files that have been talked about in the various blogs, hypem.com is quickly becoming the site to visit to check out music that is being written about on the web.
The beauty of The Hype Machine (apart from the fact that it is a competent aggregator) is that it can search and stream a plethora of MP3 files by various artists via its own search engine and MP3 player. The player uses a new open playlist format called XSPF and the Flash player is based on the extremely versatile XSPF Music Player. The Hype Machine also includes an awesome hacked integration with iTunes that takes you right from the displayed web page to the track you’re interested in purchasing. If you’d rather opt to buy through Amazon, The Hype Machine cleverly takes the user to the display of the CD page at Amazon.com.

How Does it Work?

The Hype Machine tracks and aggregates a variety of MP3 blogs. Posts containing MP3 links are tracked, and those links are automatically affixed to its database and displayed on the site’s homepage.
The blog that posted a particular track is distinguishable under every track by name and with a “read>>” link that connects to the weblog post itself. Other links that feature alongside the track are links to Amazon and iTunes stores.

Other Cool Features

The Hype Machine features an online radio broadcast called ‘Hype Radio’ that is powered entirely by blogs. The broadcast comprises of a continuous stream of MP3 tracks that have recently been written about in the blogs listed on the Hype Machine. It can be defined as Internet radio “that’s truly powered by the Internet”.