New Feature… !PEOPLE!
Every once and a while I’ll take a look at someone who is truly changing the game and making something decent. The first !People! feature focuses on Anthony Volodkin, the genius behind my current obsession, The Hype Machine. So the Hype Machine has been around for a little bit, but for all of you who are unaware, it basically takes a look at thousands of music blogs and displays to you some of the more oft-posted songs. I remember hearing about the idea of the Hype Machine a few years back but always thought that it would be some shitty web 2.0 pipe dream that never quite lived up to its completely unrealistic expectations… so wrong… so wrong… Instead its amazing. The interface is really clean and simple (deceptively 2.0 for a 3.0 site; anyone? anyone?), the blog list is gargantuan (see here), and the programming that supposedly brings you the best new music from all these disparate music blogs, really does.
SO, this is really cool in of itself… but it gets a lot better. You can subscribe to different rss feeds via iTunes, and then you can simply download the songs into your library. whoa. This is Web 3.0 done so god-awfully right.
Also you gotta love the backlash, which I shouldn’t even go into, but the two sentence version is that all these mp3 blogs are like GOSH! We give this music CONTEXT (i.e. we tell you why its good/why it sucks) and all this site does is blindly aggregate mp3s, BLINDLY AGGREGATE MP3S!!!… Remove pole from ass. Even if you are some kind of mp3 blog purist, which I didn’t even know existed before this Hype Machine backlash, you should still be able to appreciate a new way of getting music to hoi poi (even if it eats up some of your bandwidth).
So, thank you Anthony Volodkin, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, you have made my life better.
NBC 10 video here.
Volodkin’s tumblr account.
