I can’t help but feel a little sorry for music blogs as of late. I’m sure you may be familiar with The Hype Machine and may use it on a daily basis. For the uninitiated, it is essentially a music blog aggregator, which takes details of tracks and ranks them based on how often they appear and how popular they are. I’ve found it really interesting to browse around and discover new artists.
However, lately I’ve been wondering if these blogs are getting a raw deal. From my own personal experience, I can say that recommending music takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you decide to go into detail about your choices. Often, the recommendations which the Hype Machine scans are sourced from long detailed blog posts, which I’d say were put together to provide some context for why the author made those choices on any particular day. These aren’t put up quickly without little thought. However, I generally never look at these posts when listening to music from the hype machine, as I’m after that next great track fix. I can’t imagine that these blogs get much traffic that translates into loyal visitors from the machine. I’ve previously also heard that many of these blogs get a huge amount of their bandwidth eaten up from the number of downloads/streaming they get as a result. I don’t know who is to blame here, or if indeed this problem exists, whether the blogs are providing unneccessary background information or getting good results from the machine, but I still feel a little sorry for them all the same.
[Update 2/2/08: One thing I forgot to mention here is that there are alternative services offering a different way of providing music recommendations. I recently discovered the Peoples Music Store which allows users to make music recommendations within their own unique stores. The users get 10% of the sale if people decide to purchase from their stores. I really like the idea, but I'd imagine people might take these recommendations and purchase somewhere cheaper, like amazon.]
The Hype Machine provides a fair bit of traffic but for the more established blogs it usually falls down to less than 30% of total traffic to their site with the majority coming direct to the site and from Google.
The Hype Machine is a great way to aggregate a lot of the better blogs into one place but I feel that they haven’t yet got the most elegant of solutions.
For one the blog to have most recently posted a track is placed first in search results, rather than the blog who “broke” the new track in.
Related to this issue there are a lot of rubbish blogs on the Hype Machine who are posting just an image, a single sentence and a bunch of tracks. I think this detracts from those writing more extensive posts which carry a bit of background and an actual opinion.
Finally the Hype Machine lets the blogs down by not listing posts which do not contain an mp3 and also by not having the ability to search for an artist or key word. Often I go to find out more information about an artist and have to revert to discogs or google because if a Hypem blog doesn’t have the track then Hypem doesn’t know about the artist.
Ned
I’d have to agree Ned. It did actually take me sometime to find decent posts to link to that had descriptions which gave a little more information on the tracks. Most had a link to the mp3.
I think there will always be a place for good writing about music, whether with sound files or not.
I for one want to know the backstory and how it fits into the history of music. For me music blogs are a good source of more obscure and forgotten/sidelined music from the past.
But Hype Machine’s focus on newer music and MP3 blogs exclusively is reflection of popular demand.
Ned, I think Hype Machine emphasise newer blogs in search results because of the bandwidth issues Ian mentioned. Very often the earliest links to tracks have already expired by the time you get there.
I’d be interested to see how many people are using the Hype Machine favourite feature, where you can track your trusted sources. I imagine there are plenty of people using it who don’t actually use feed readers. Good idea on their part.
Besides, Ian – I think the savvier bloggers should be rising above Hype Machine by getting together and launching fully fledged group blogs, as Drowned In Sound and Pitchfork Media have fairly successfully done.
I agree that finding a good aggregator that also gives you some level of backstory/background is a challenge.
Do most of you use them primarily for the relevant linking or for new music discover?
Jeff
Relevant linking Jeff? I don’t think I understand what you mean there. I mainly use it to discover new stuff I may like.
Hi Ian,
I’m speaking of being finding blogs that help you discover new music that you contribute to by commenting and get a backlink to your own relevant site to help build that community as well.
Jeff
Ok, I see. My experience generally is that the time and effort that it would take to try and do that would outweigh the contributions played on my own site. I generally comment on something because I’d like to comment on it, rather than in the hope that someone might check out my own blog…
We’re talking about the same thing. I don’t believe in wasting mine or another site owner’s time with spam “Great post” comments.
I comment on something because it’s of interest to me but it’s nice to also get a backlink for my time and effort.