![]() Still, one cannot argue that the website makes it much easier and more interesting to discover new artists and blogs. In general, the line between Hype Machine and the music blogs that tend to offer music for free can be seen as grey. Users can go to the website and use it to see which songs have the most hearts, which generally includes some of the larger names, like Lil’ Wayne. Though the site seems to promote the discovery of non-mainstream music, the emphasis on the “Popular” page seems to contradict that vision.“There’s collateral damage here, and if you’re a fan of independent music, it could be everything you hold dear” (Pattison, 2007, pg 1). The sheer amount of music blogs in existence can be seen as damaging to the independent music industry, and as exploiting these artists.Downloading is not allowed on the site itself, but it “occupies a legal grey area,” where it gives the user the location of the music source (Heilemann, 2007, pg 1). The obvious ability to reach illegally available music.Songs are added to the site as soon as they are detected, and are updated immediately. Users not only find various kinds of music, but they can find them as soon as they are available to the public.In a day and age where magazines and music shops have been left behind as ways to discover music, Hype Machine combines a slew of resources available and combines them in an innovative way. The site takes advantage of what is current and attractive to devoted music fans.Creator Anthony Volodkin made sure that users would not be able to download the music from Hype Machine itself. It offers the links to the song on Amazon or iTunes so that users can download the music legally.Users are can specialize their music preference, allowing for a much more personalized experience.Users are offered a wide platform of blogs to choose from, and may discover new sources of music to come back to. ![]() Hype Machine offers a much more efficient way of combining different sources of new music, yet it also makes it easier to exploit leaked music. Still, there are many ways in which users can unknowingly take advantage of the artists they think they are supporting. Otherwise, the Hype Machine’s chart is just going to keep on getting RickRolled.Music blogs have emerged as a very beneficial tool in terms of discovering new artists and expanding users’ musical horizons. If there was a way to figure out who are the music experts or influencers on Twitter and give their Tweets more weight, that would create a more interesting list. Ranking music based on roughly on how many Twitter followers someone has is just as lame as any of the other methods the Hype Machinists are trying to replace. But the bigger problem with ranking songs based on someone’s popularity on Twitter is that just because someone has a lot of followers doesn’t man they have good taste in music (TechCrunch and myself excluded, of course). To be fair, it just launched, and as more people start voting, the system should self-correct. No single person should be able to affect the rankings so easily. Every time I Tweet out a song link, it counts for 266 points, noyt enough to get a song to the top spot with one Tweet, but enough to move “Superteen” by The Care Bears On Fire from the No. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t fair to use the TechCrunch account, but what else am I gonna do on a Saturday morning plane ride back to New York (gotta love Virgin America’s WiFi in the sky).Įven before I Tweeted the link with the TechCrunch account, I Tweeted it first through my personal account, which only has 7,224 followers, and was able to get the song to debut on the list at No. ![]() A single Tweet was enough to put the song at the top of the chart, above Michael Jackson’s and Telepopmusik’s “Remember The Time” (1,972 points). The TechCrunch account has 916,735 followers, which gives each Hype Machine Tweet 2,997 points. I just RickRolled the chart by Tweeting a link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” from the TechCrunch Twitter account. It seems straight-forward enough, but it is way too easy for people with a large number of Twitter followers to game. ![]() The songs with the most points, move up the chart. They came up with a formula which gives people with more followers on Twitter more points for every song they Tweet. It encourages people to Tweet out links to their favorite songs on the Hype Machine, where you can listen to the full audio stream. The folks at the Hype Machine, the popular music tracking site, think that all of the Twitter music charts out there are “lame,” so they decided to make their own Twitter Music Chart. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |