Deserved Hype for the Hype Machine
The quest for free music and sharing music could be seen as starting, or really taking force, with the tape, sitting next to the radio and pressing record, trying to stop the recording before the DJ started speaking. Then you would share your tapes, your compiled playlists, with friends allowing them to record it onto their own tape player. Of course, I may be ignoring times even before this when people perhaps had managed to get a copy of the musical manuscript for Mozart’s latest hit! Perhaps not.
Anyway, over recent years, this phenomena could be said to have truly taken off in an ever increasing movement, jumping from one method to another, always one step ahead of that bumbling park warden known as the Copyright Law!
Since it moved onto the internet, via programs such as Napster and later on Limewire, there has been an unending way of getting music by all your favourite artists, and I must say that I am a firm favourite of the current method: the musical blog.
Essentially, as a brief summary, there are infinite blogs where people talk about all types of artists and bands and make them available to download. This is particularly useful for finding more artists that you might like, but have never heard before. Brief descriptions on all the tracks allow you to gauge whether you might like it or not before you download. Moreover, quite often blogs will deal with one specific type of music and so if you find one you like it becomes a great source for continually downloading music.
However, there are of course problems. For one, finding all the good blogs for you can be difficult and long. Also, while descriptions allow you to perhaps gauge slightly if you will like a song or not, it is still a risky business; you will undoubtedly download a lot of rubbish songs that clutter up your disk space and waste your time downloading! Furthermore, blogs do not tend to have a search function allowing you to find a specific artist you are looking for. In this case, you can use the blog search function on google, but this tends to either give you spanish sites or just a place where you can buy them etc. By the time you might find the artist you are looking for, the download link may have expired. Not good enough!
And so, it is my great honour to introduce The Hype Machine! (applause)
The Hype Machine has been around for quite a bit of time now, but still people don’t know about it, so I think it’s time I make it known. What the Hype Machine allows you to do is type in a band and then it will search thousands and thousands of blogs for you, providing you with what songs are available by the band and the link to the blog where you can download it. Therefore, you are not limited to just whatever the blogs give you, but can search the blogs for what you want.
And now, after recent developments, you can actually play the song on the Hype Machine, so if it’s a song you haven’t heard before, you can see if you like it. What more could be wanted? Even its advertising space is given to cool advertisers like American Apparel and the promotion of call new independent films.
It is brilliant!
Now, I am not going to get into an argument here regarding whether this is right, whether it is taking money away from the musicians and so forth; I will be discussing that in another entry shortly. All I want to do, is show those who do like to download free music (which is pretty much everyone!), that there is a fantastic little world called Hype Machine.
It’s logo is of a tuba or some brass instrument emitting a speech bubble with a heart in it and I’ve got to say that completely reflects my sentiments regarding the Hype Machine!
It has been nominated for a PLUG award so please see how great it is and vote!
www.hypem.com
gareth said,
January 16, 2008 at 10:43 am
this thing is brilliant, i don’t give a fuck whether it’s right or wrong, i am now listening to a Travis hidden track which i haven’t been able to find anywhere on the internet before. And for this Mr. Friel, you deserve to be applauded.