Hey, Fortune! I know that as a Time Inc. publication in 2008, you're pretty much charged with putting a shiny happy gloss on news pegs for "interesting" business ventures out there, and doing so in word counts that are dwindling so quickly, you'll eventually be communicating via semaphore. (Or photo galleries. Or both.) But when you drop a statement like "Just as the political bloggers are altering the outcome of elections, MP3 bloggers are changing the way people discover new music" in an otherwise decent article on the Hype Machine, maybe you should actually hold up an example of that "discovery," so as to give your readers a little bit of context? Especially given that the one good thing the Internet music elite seem to be better at chewing bands up and spitting them out before they've even been partially digested than actually "discovering" them? [CNNMoney]
A 58% year-to-year increase in monthly unique visitors has resulted in imeem becoming the No. 1 destination for streaming music on the Web, according to statistics collected by compete.com in March 2008; the former No. 1, Yahoo! Music, slipped to No. 2 on a 14% year-to-year dip (9.6 million). Coming in at No. 7 on the Compete countdown with 2.3 million uniques: HM1500, a shorthand term for the aggregate unique-visitor traffic of more than 1,500 music blogs tracked by the Hype Machine. (The Machine itself is at No. 16.) One glaring omission from Compete's list: YouTube, which I use for streaming much, much more than any of the sites in the top 20. (I know, I know, pulling music-only data out is a pain in the butt, but they're an analytics company! They can analyze!) [Compete.com]
Say what you will about the tendencies of music bloggers toward the "hipper-than-thou," but the Hype Machine doesn't lie: A lot of them also think Chris Martin is 100% dreamy. [Hipster Runoff]
Getting 10,000 people who read music blogs to hit its front page at the same time proved to be too much of a challenge for the music-blog aggregator The Hype Machine, so the powers that be over there abandoned their virtual sit-in and threw open the doors to the new, pretty, spying-enabled version. [Hype Machine]
In case you haven't noticed yet today, a spanking updated version of MP3 blog aggregator/life-saving tool the Hype Machine has launched. Well, it hasn't quite launched. It's waiting for 10,000 readers to hit the front page before it officially opens its door. Everybody go there right now if you want the steady stream of M.I.A. remixes to continue flowing.
At least in terms of finding new shit to listen to. This graph is taken from the results of a straw poll put together by MP3 blog catch-all the Hype Machine to find out how its readers "discover new music," and as you can clearly see, the Internet is kicking human contact's ass!
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Who Says The Music Blogs All Post The Same Songs?
From today's Hype Machine "Popular" list. Amazingly, numbers 6 through 40 are all remixes of "Monster Mash." (And yes, we're aware of the "pot, meet kettle" hypocrisy).
Popular Blog Tracks [The Hype Machine]
(Ed. note: Yesterday was April Fool's Day, which spurred several music-related prank attempts on the web. In an effort to prevent mass "WTF??!" email missives, we present this handy fact-checking guide)
No one here at Idolator claims to be a genius; heck, we're not even sure how to pronounce the name of our own damn site (which, by the way, we wanted to name enya-thusiast.org). But in an effort to share whatever trifling amount of online-music knowledge we have acquired, we're happy to announce Idolator's Instantly Outdated Guide to Internet Music. As its easy-to-remember acronym implies, IIOGTIM is an ever-expanding list of sites, tools, and sites that are run by tools.
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Idolator
