Precursor
Hype Machine for us is like a long lost relative who left in a huff and we haven’t heard from in years. The last thing we want is for them to be gone forever. But if they are out there, maybe they should acknowledge the elephant in the room we’re going to discuss now.
Hype Machine once thrived as one of the main port of calls for new music. A combination of changes in the music market and other factors have contributed to a decline in their user base.
Once a streaming service ahead of it’s time, Hype Machine gave a voice for music blogs to cut through the MP3s era. You wanted to find the latest bootleg, you knew where you were heading.
In recent times, Hype Machine’s consistent culling of blogs and the general music consumers move to the “music streaming subscription model” has resulted in it’s new voluntary donation based business model to keep it alive.
‘As music experiences on the internet have become more centralized, powered by a handful of large services, they’ve also become more alike.’ – HypeM
To give you a little back story – After six years of work building up our following and user base on HypeM, we were unexpectedly kicked off for good. The reason was because we had a music publicist writing for us, who turned out to be writing across multiple music sites that aggregated to their site. He was writing for us no less than 2 to 3 months and in the eyes of the HypeM admin, this was a breach of their site’s integrity… Fair enough. The result of the breach was a suspension for 3 months… After contacting them post the suspension period with a revised music team, we were denied site aggregation and effectively lost our community of 5,000 users we’d worked hard to grow.
Kicking not only us, but a crap load of the most credible, long standing and hardest working music blogs that made the charts so appealing, effectively re-wrote the script for where we were going to build and direct our online communities. The message couldn’t be clearer. HypeM doesn’t address issues, they sweep them under a rug.
This is going to sound brutal but, if you think donating your money to them is going to save them. I got some bad new for you.
^ URL for the ‘Popular’ chart that sat lazily on their site for if not more than half a year.
This is a company that for the large part doesn’t appear to reinvest or exert much effort into improving their services. They automate their social feeds, kick countless blogs out of their community for seemingly minor breaches and rarely add any update features to their site. A sitting duck.
Despite this, they’re very willing to take your money but totally unwilling to compromise, engage or evolve with the communities that made their platform rich and appealing. Save your pennies for when they’re ready do real updates and reconnect with more hard working music communities they’ve dumped.
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