Where to Find the Next American Idol

If I were a record producer, I would be crawling over The Hype Machine. The site is an experiment that aggregates songs posted on MP3 blogs and presents them in an organized interface.

Comments

[//jonathan]

i publish a website that is being leeched by the hypemachine. i have asked them to stop including me, and i'll see if they do. i know that other french musicblogs are up in arms about this too.

why? we publish rss feeds as a convenience for genuine readers. all this guy is doing is scraping our feed and extracting the link to the mp3 file. if you have an amazon partner link he also scrapes that and puts his partner code in there. currently i don't make anything from amazon, so it's not about lost income -- just principal and ethics.

for me this is doubly unethical. i happen to spend quite a bit of time preparing content for my site, and then translating material into french. all my content is from downloads that the musicians or their labels have made available [i'm mostly indie pop/rock]. i try to encourage people to download responsibly and with respect for the artists. by stripping away all context and my content this leecher is encouraging people to just download willynilly, with no thought for their actions.

i am pretty mad about this. it is totally different from someone putting a few ads on a site like bloglines. i feel this guy is ripping off my hard work. and spitting in the face of my ethics.

[t-ry]

Along with Jonathan, I consider this application as non-ethical and a potential reason for me to stop publish RSS feeds.

Mp3 blogs are not just about posting songs. They are about giving exposure to artists. That includes notes along with the song, but also links to the artists website. Those links are, of course, not re-published by the hype machine.

Of course, there is no way one can't prevent such applications. In general, blog content is meant to be syndicated, and I do like my feed being re-published by mp3blogs.org, webnymph and other aggregators.

But the hype machine does exactly the opposite. It removes the blog content from the feed. With the search feature on it's way, it is bringing back music to P2P days: non-valorized content waiting to be grabbed.

I personally refuse to make one cent out of mp3blogging as a proof of my editorial independence, so I don't use amazon partner links. But for most mp3 bloggers, amazon partner links are not about earning money - the revenues are ridiculous - but they are a convenient way to actually check our influence in terms of purchases.

If the guy is making money out of this, he owes me some money, he owes the artists some money, he owes the producers some money, he owes the songwriters some money. I wish him great luck in trying to legally settle a business model out of this. Without me.

[Anthony Volodkin]

I’ve started my site because I wanted to help people find something new to listen to, something new to read. I wanted to let people do that by listening first, reading later. So far this seems to have made some people either really happy or really angry, which is interesting, to say the least.

For me personally, this really works - I really enjoy scrolling around the Winamp playlist and listening to some random things that come up. At this point, it has happened quite a few times that I’ve become curious who the blogger was that posted the song and checked out their blog + more of their tracks. (I explained this a bit more here: http://www.stereogum.com/archives/001449.html)

I think in the end, good music that many people post gets heard, their blogs get read because the music is good, and artists get exposure, because they’ve been discussed. It works. And isn’t this exactly what bloggers set out to do?

I strongly disagree with those who see my website as “yet another free music download tool” or as “stealing from bloggers” - about 4 of those writers have of course been removed from my site as per their request.

Anthony Volodkin
http://hype.non-standard.net/

[Darwin]

I posted this comment over at a Stereogum discussion about the Hype Machine, but it fits in just as well here :

I admit I was a bit confused by hype.non-standard when I saw my first referrers from it, but since then it has already surpassed mp3blogs.org in terms of usefulness as a referrer. My files are hosted under a different subdomain (and he's caching them anyway) so these extra referrers are by definition people who are reading the posts. Frankly I'm all for it, and I particularly like the idea of streaming radio, which dude is paying out of his own pocket. That's sorta like a dream come true, being a part of this specialized radio station of "music people liked enough to share." I would like the url of my blog to be encoded into the stream somehow, but that's a minor technical quibble.

The other mp3 blog aggregators are in a state of desperate disrepair due to lack of editting/quality control/posting policy. I post my RSS feed because I want my content to be available to the widest possible audience. He's not re-publishing any content which was created by me (although I guess he does when I post original music ;D) but most importantly he is ATTRIBUTING what he is re-publishing. I see it as free hype, and I appreciate it. I like it when people read my blog.

Just my $.02.

=darwin
(www.nuclearbeef.com)

[//jonathan]

First of all, The Hype Machine answered my mail and removed my blog. In that he is acting correctly. He sent a boilerplate mail saying how disappointed he was by the reaction. This part is -- IMO -- where he is trying to trick himself and the world.
1 -- mp3blogs lists the entry. they provide a discovery service and traffic
2 -- the Hype Machine is just an encouragement to download the mp3s. Ok, the posts were linked to [but not with the mp3s, although he has changed this]
3 -- he has not addressed the issue, at any moment, of the ethics of 'kidnapping' the amazon links.

Under pressure he has made improvements, and i would be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt --- but for the amazon kidnapping...

//jonathan