Hype Machine Zeitgeist: Listen in Full to the 50 Most Blogged Albums of 2008, For Free
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / January 5, 2009 12:53 PM
/ 5 Comments
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.
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.
Comments
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It's probably one of the few sites I set aside for my weekends just to get a feel for new music tastes [as I am an 80s nut] and true enough I keep discovering gems. Just when I thought that HypeM can't get any better! [Huhu, Pitchfork] Looking forward to the countdown, Marshall!
Best.
alain
Posted by: Alain Yap, Morph Labs
|
January 5, 2009 1:51 PM
big fan of Hypem. Recently wrote about them here:
http://gheller.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/5-web-services-that-left-a-mark-on-2008/
Posted by: jon | January 5, 2009 2:20 PM
You can also scrobble tracks that you listen to on Hypem to your Last.fm profile. The Zeitgeist looks like a nice find. Cheers!
Posted by: David Young
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January 5, 2009 2:47 PM
This is really cool. I love hype machine. Thanks!
Posted by: Nicholas Quixote | January 5, 2009 7:09 PM
im your big fan now. :)
Posted by: ursula_herman | January 7, 2009 8:52 AM