Category Archives: Etc.

What is the Hype Machine?

The Hype Machine tracks songs and discussion posted on the best music blogs. Easily listen, discover and buy songs that everyone is talking about!

For any media-minded investor, the appeal of Volodkin and the Hype Machine is easy enough to see. Since the rise of Napster, the music industry has been in a prolonged state of upheaval – one that is only growing more chaotic. New tools are being invented (Pandora, Last.fm) for navigating the new digital soundscape. New avenues for promotion (the MP3 blogs) are emerging as star-making vehicles for acts like Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley. (The summer megahit “Crazy,” for example, first showed up on the Hype Machine last October.)

In this context, it’s not surprising that the Web is also enabling what Volodkin(20-year old founder of Hype Machine) calls a “new kind of conversation about music.”

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Business 2.0–Capturing the buzz
Hype Machine

Online video sites, hot targets?

Yet MySpace offers an interesting contrast in how online video is already beginning to pay off. MySpace is used for online distribution of TV and film from News Corp.’s Fox Entertainment. The site, built around a network of home pages laden with messages and photos, already generates a huge volume of video, according to comScore Networks. A comScore report on Sept. 27 said MySpace generated 1.5 billion video streams during the month of July, beating out No. 2 Yahoo and No. 3 YouTube. The survey only ranks free video streams. If the market is measured by the number of video users, as opposed to the number of videos watched, MySpace ranks third behind Yahoo and YouTube.

More at Businessweek

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