On the future of folk, music blogging, and quality.
Hypem – The Hype Machine – is amazing. They took a simple starting point: People blog about music. Added an obvious idea: People want to listen to that music. Built some smart software to bring the two together, designed an elegant interface for it, and that was that. Amazing web application.
It’s easy to search for music. For instance, just now I searched for tracks by Voice of the Seven Woods, a brilliant contemporary folk band from the UK. They’ve made a lot of music over the past couple years, but only a little of it has made it onto proper releases, so finding tracks on the internet is crucial.
Hypem gave me a list of 14 blog posts that contain Voice of the Seven Woods tracks on them. I can listen to the tracks online, through Hypem, go directly to the original post, or buy the tracks through Amazon or iTunes. (Hypem seems to only list DRM-free music, which is pretty much as it should be.) And I can subscribe to a feed for this list, meaning that I can easily keep track of Voice of the Seven Woods music blogging.
One other cool thing: In addition to the requisite hot music page, they’ve got a spy page, where you can see what other people are searching for. Scrolling through the list just now, I found half a dozen tracks that I’m psyched to listen to, but wouldn’t have thought of searching for.
It’s like Technorati, but useful.
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