“Audio RSS” at the Hype Machine 21 Jul 2005
7 comments Latest by Moshe
The Hype Machine aggregates songs posted at MP3 blogs — as Stereogum puts it, it’s “audio RSS for Generation Lazy.”
The site takes individual songs posted at various MP3 blogs and then links the tracks to its database, displays them on the front page, and pops ‘em all into a Flash player (or your own media player if you prefer). It’s like having an online radio station made up of MP3 blog selections.
The songs are served via Coral, a service that caches frequently accessed files across a widely distributed network of servers. This means that bloggers’ bandwidth is not used. Nonetheless, some MP3 bloggers feel like, well, I’ll just quote Robot Mark’s comment: “As an mp3 blogger, I personally don’t really like it. We get special permission from bands and labels to post what we do, and then this douche comes along and hijacks our shit.”
MP3 bloggers bitching about having their content hijacked? Hmmm. But does Mark have a point? Anthony from the Hype Machine responds, “I’ve created this site to let people find something new and to also facilitate discovery of quality bloggers, but in my case it happens in a sequence which seems to make some people uncomfortable: people listen to music first then read the posts.” He’ll also remove a blog if the author doesn’t want it included in the site.
Related: Elbo.ws is another site that aggregates MP3 blog posts and links (it’s searchable too).
7 comments so far (Jump to latest)
Dan Boland 21 Jul 05
I think if the blogger has the ultimate control over whether or not they appear on the site (provided the artist has the ultimate control over whether their music gets posted to a blog in the first place), then I don’t personally see a problem.
mh 21 Jul 05
I personally don’t get this “for evaluation purposes only” qualification that the mp3 blog sites usually post. If the record company (RECORD COMPANY!!) has OK’ed the posting of the track, in this day and age of DRM ball & chains, wouldn’t it be fair to assume that you could keep the tracks?
serge 21 Jul 05
It’s not all about mp3 bloggers getting their ripped CD collections aggregated - indie labels releasing free CC licenced music are invited to the party too.
Hype Machine, el.bows and Big Contact have all made a massive contribution to our site’s referals and mp3 downloads.
3,000+ downloads and counting for a single track - if these were sales figures, we’d have made the UK Top 100…
aggregation + attribution = hype
Scott 22 Jul 05
I bet they could bet more hype if they rebranded it as a podcast radio station.
Panayotis Vryonis 28 Jul 05
Anyone could do something like this by using del.icio.us and feedburner, as I mentioned at my blog
thomas 07 Oct 05
there’s a service doing the same thing for music news, ie. scraping off other people’s content although bandnews takes only the first bits of text.
for me it’s ok as long as copyright issues are sorted out and the bands are profiting from the added exposure through such services.
i guess with mp3s it’s a little bit more complicated than with just news.
greets, thomas
Moshe 18 Nov 05
It is The End.
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