EDITORIAL: So, how does Hype Machine work? Every once in awhile somebody will ask a question on how they charted on Hypem or how does somebody get on the Hype Machine Music blog. It’s a easy question to answer so here you once you understand some pretty passionate people put this together to be best place to discovery music on the web.
First step Is you have to create user account. Either as a user who wants to participate on every day posts or as user who wants to submit a new blog to them for consideration. They looks for users who post unique content and by bloggers who or not just fly by night. In particular MP3 blogs who offer links of the file on their site like reviewstalker. On your site they provide a code snip which is a link that tells their servers to ping your site for new content. [Here is how they pick blogs] Once they do a miracle will happen. You will start to see HYPEM sending web traffic to your site! Just takes a little curiosity from a music lover. VIOLA!
DOWNLOAD: Dum Dum Girls –Evil Blooms MP3 from Too True.
Regarding charting
I will be honest, I have had not paid much attention to how charting works recently but here is how I understood it to help you. The hypem technology is such you can provide the twitter link or their direct link for people to vote your songs up, “heart”/Like them. The more users who like the tune, Re-tweet it will add points to the chart and in turn you can listen and check it out. The trick is the window is time sensitive so points go down if there is no action on a song. Really tests the limits of what it means to be viral in real time; unlike youtube for instance which counts all views. They have recently added in time machine functionality so you can see what was popular in 2012 if you wanted, or what is being tweeted about on twitter, best remixes, most popular artist and all sorts of combos. What was blogged a lot of and on and on.
This is also a user acquisition play for them so they want new users to create accounts who can vote so in turn they can have unique visitors and display their ads and traffic to them the latest from the Dum Dum Girls is available in order to make a sticky site people use.
Their site keeps track of who posts songs, how many blogs have featured a tune and turn have a real time charting system for every genre of music. It’s about sharing and discovery.
Anyway not sure if this helps explain it but idea is people who go on there have something in mind and will ultimately find it. The site historically has driven about 25% or more on average the traffic to my site. It’s gone down less lately because we have not been posting as many downloads as we used to since we also now do reviews with streams only.
There were also similar aggregator sites elbow.ws (RIP) and shuffler.fm who drive traffic but not as much as hypem does or did for us. Google is taking over the albatross searches more and more replacing their once organic results with their own properties. Can you say conflict of interest? My theory is more than likely traffic is affected because of bandcamp and soundcloud being popular channels for music discovery, same as emusic and other music doing a good job editorializing music you can buy on the site. Or China is just taking over…
DOWNLOAD: Atkins, Martin’s China Dub Soundsystem – Radio China MP3 from Made in China (You know the guy from Ministry)
The cool thing still though is that hypem is about all of the independent music bloggers who take the time to write about things they dig; can all be basically found in one place. So it’s more than some random comment on individual pages no one will really see. The good news they are smart and also sniff for soundcloud and bandcamp embedding. So takes care of less DMCA notices.
Ok hope this helps you a little bit. I’m sure google and facebook will have more surprises for us this year but we’ll survive.
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