Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.
MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.
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Lots of sites have published top album lists for the past year, but Hype Machine tells us objectively who the most popular musicians on the web have been, at least among the army of music bloggers it's been tracking for years. The Top 50 lists will be published throughout this week, starting with the 50th through 41st most popular songs, bands and albums posted today.
Technology combined with Hype Machine's own aggregation and parsing includes:
- Imeem Flash players that let you listen to entire albums for free. Not thrown haphazardly on the site, either, they are displayed beautifully.
- Creative Commons photos of the bands are used to illustrate each entry. The effect is really nice. Reminiscent of what we've see at travel social network Dopplr but actually inspired, they say, by this similar city guide to Berlin.
- Blog Fresh Radio has produced embeddable "shows" about all the music, including interviews with the artists.
- Musebin has been used to automatically create 1 line album reviews, parsed from all the blog coverage discovered via Hype Machine. Visitors can click through multiple reviews without leaving the page.
The end result is an awesome site that we'll be visiting all week and beyond. When it comes to data driven media mashups, we can't sing Hype Machine's praises loud enough. With this new site they've really outdone themselves.
Check it out at hypem.com/zeitgeist.
