The Music Hype Machine Grows Up
By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia
Not long ago, people had few choices for finding new music. These included listening to the radio, hanging out in their friend’s bedroom listening to their collection, or subscribing to a music magazine. All three were really limiting.
Radio limited the music they played to the hits; you were limited by the number of your friends’ record collections, which were limited by their budget … and the same with magazine subscriptions.
Over the last 10 years the barriers have come down. The web has provided many new ways to create, promote, find, share and talk about music. Digital music became a reality; applications such as Napster and Rhapsody came online and the magazines went digital. Then the online self-publishing craze called blogging started and the first music blogs were created.
At first there were but a handful of blogs posting reviews and offering streams or downloads of the music with names like Music for Robots, Said the Gramophone and FluxBlog. But, search for “Music Blog” on Google today and you’ll find over 73 million results.
Just over three years ago, 19-year-old Anthony Volodkin was studying computer science at Hunter College in New York. He had grown tired of the music he and his friends owned. He was disillusioned by the offerings of commercial radio and found traditional music magazines to not be an objective source of information.
Having reached his limit, he turned to the Net to look for new music and there he found music blogs. It soon became a bit of an obsession. He would spend late nights getting lost in the many blogs and the music they wrote about and shared.
Realizing he was spending a lot of time hopping from blog to blog, he imagined that there were other music enthusiasts who may not have the time to spend seeking them out, but were just as voracious about new music. So he decided to build a site that would aggregate the posts from a number of blogs into one site.
In April of 2005, he launched The Hype Machine to provide a snapshot of what was going on in music blogging and make it easier to search through recently posted mp3s.
He sent the link around to some of the blogs and others in the online music space, and they passed the word about this new way to discover music. By creating a cross-promotional relationship with music bloggers around the world, The Hype Machine quickly became one of the hottest resources for discovering new music.
The site is set up for optimal music discovery. Content is sorted by recent postings to the participating blogs. The Popular page includes popular tracks that visitors have listened to over the past three days and the Spy page tracks what people have been doing on the site for the last 90 seconds or so - what they have been searching or what they clicked on.
Volodkin says blogs and The Hype Machine are…”all part of a bigger web ecosystem of music which include Last FM, YouTube, Pandora and other services that create a really compelling experience for music online, that competes very strongly with radio.”
He said a lot of people are spending a lot more time on the blogs, getting more and more of their music and news online and reading less magazines. He expects the online market to only increase.
What started as side project and a distraction to school is, now that he has graduated, Volodkin’s sole focus. He’s intent on turning it into a business that exposes music blog activity in the way Google news exposes what the newspapers are talking about. In the last year, he increased his staff to four people, redesigned the site to enhance the user experience and advertising potential.
He also spent some time pursuing venture capital. Quickly he found out that the VCs were concerned by the volatile attitude of the music industry towards ventures that are using music online in some way.
Undaunted, Volodkin and his team refocused themselves on making the product better, scaling the platform and growing the audience. The new focus is on letting members discover people through some interaction they have had with the music.
They continually update and tweak the site based on user feedback and suggestions, but always with, as he says, “a clear vision of creating new directions to communicate the idea of people discovering interesting music as a result of the activity of others, in some valuable way.” Also, they made the site more personal and interactive by adding member profiles and allowing members to see what other members are doing on the site.
Last month The Hype Machine topped 800,000 unique visitors. In addition to the music fans, the music industry itself has found value in music blogs … and The Hype Zone in particular.
Label A&R departments, artist management firms, music magazines and even radio stations frequent the sites looking for new talent. The Hype Zone’s “Most Popular” section is a great place to instantly find music that is making an impact on the community.
Today at 22, Volodkin says he’s learned a lot about business and about himself since starting the site. Most enlightening to him is how important, yet difficult it is creating a healthy mix of interactions with the users, the feedback and responses they provide balanced with leading and creating something you think should exist.
The Hype Machine http://www.hypem.com
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