So last week I mentioned the mp3-blog music aggregator Indieum. Shortly after (about fourteen years ago in Internet time), fellow Metric fan Anthony Volodkin wrote in to mention the "little" site he's been working on: The Hype Machine.
Hipsters, that sound you just heard was your iPod crapping its shiny casing.
I just shot my witticism wad with that line, since I'm more braindead than usual tonight, and I've still only barely played with either site, so I'll try to keep the rest of this brief and somewhat sane: THM looks like the Google of mp3-blogs to Indieum's, uh, much smaller Google. So I think their maybe going after different audiences here. Indieum's surveys a handful of what I believe are the "top" mp3-blogs to give you a good skimming off the top. Because you don't have time to check everything out. THM, on the other hand, gathers links to MP3s from a fairly large number of blogs, so when you--ahem--"tune in"--as it were--you're going to get everything there is. Because you will make time to check everything out.
That said, THM seems to have a few more things in mind for its audience. Namely, it lets you check listings for individual mp3-blogs, letting you pick and choose which bits of noise you want to cull out. Plus--and this might be killer--THM pushes podcasting ability. As in you can pick an mp3-blog's listing on the site--or, the entire site, because you live and breathe the cutting edge--and pull out a podcast feed which you can drop into iTunes and, voila, your iPod is magically filled for you with delicious new tunes. I imagine many mp3-blogs have their own podcast abilities, but there's something nice about having something like that centralized for the sake of convenience, if you're of the multiple-blog persuasion, at least. (I've already got the Salon Audiofile feed subscribed and downloaded, which is kind of a dreamy situation.) As is right now it looks like it would take some finagling to get the podcasted song files to act as part of a playlist on the iPod--which I'm sure there's ways to do, and I'd find them, if I weren't lazy, and ready for bed.
So in conclusion you're either already playing with The Hype Machine because you're in love with it, or you're still reading this because you're hoping I can make it clear why this is cool. If I weren't so tired I'd take a better stab at it than this: it's like what radio should be, except, it doesn't suck real bad. (I think.) [Edit: While I had read the site's tag line before I wrote this concluding paragraph, yeah, I didn't intentionally copy one for the other. Quite accidental, honest. Yeah, I'm tired.] [Edit again: Maybe I hadn't read the site's tag line before I wrote this concluding paragraph. Because, see, it's a rotating tag-line. As in, you get different tag-lines whenever you hit the site. So, right. Please disregard here whatever needs to be disregarded.]
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