Hype Machine turned 12 last week! That’s a long time for any service, especially an independent one. How long have you been listening with us?
To celebrate, we’ve redesigned the site for better navigation and playback, and added a few new features.
We’ve also introduced a way to fund our work directly. With your support, we can continue to build new pathways for music discovery for many more years to come. Join us here.
Update May 20, 2017 We’ve reached our first goal of 1,000 supporters, our first step towards sustainability. Thank you! A lot of work is ahead, however – to continue developing the service we need at least 3,000 monthly supporters. Join us.
Update May 22, 2017 Read what our supporters are saying about Hype Machine.
It’s here! Our 10th annual roundup of the year’s best music, with the most-discussed artists and videos of 2016, and every longread we’ve Stacked each week. To start, we’ve compiled a few of the stories we’ve followed in Stack throughout the year, with artists, labels, and genres that have gained prominence in 2016.
You can also play the Artists and Stack Stories playlists on Spotify.
Click through to refresh your memory of 2016, or catch up on what you may have missed this year. There’s always more music to discover.
For the first time since it’s release in 2011, Hype Machine for iOS is available for free in the App Store!
Here’s what’s new in this release:
We’ve added an easier way to read blog posts when playing a track: just swipe up on the artwork to see the list.
There are a few other changes: we’ve removed the offline mode to comply with SoundCloud’s Terms of Service. This update also makes it easier to jump to your synced favorites in the SoundCloud app—tap the button on your profile screen.
Users of Hype Machine’s Android and iOS apps will notice that display ads have started running in their apps.
We are grateful to everybody who’s purchased the apps since we began releasing them in 2011. These sales allowed us to maintain them and develop new features, and we thank you for your support.
We know that it’s frustrating to see ads in an app you’ve paid for, and we wish we could keep the experience ad-free. Unfortunately, as a small team without outside funding, it is no longer possible for us to keep the app running without the revenue that advertising can provide.
Hype Machine has supported itself with advertising since 2005, and with these changes, we hope to keep bringing you new music for many more years to come. Thank you for listening with us.
UPDATE 12/14/16
We considered many options before introducing ads in our apps, and there are many reasons why subscription/donation/IAP offers were not workable for us at the time (for example, supporting two product experiences is tough for a team of three people).
Given the strong show of support for an ad-free solution since the announcement, we are looking into ways people could remove ads in the apps. If you are interested, sign up here.
UPDATE 03/23/17
Ads in our mobile apps have been temporarily disabled.
We started working on Spotify integration earlier this year, and many of you have already linked your accounts. Now you can sync your favorites and play your Hype Machine finds in Spotify!
Connect here and enable Favorites Sync to begin importing your favorites to a private Spotify playlist. New favorites will be synced automatically.
Also follow us on Spotify to hear our Latest, Stack, and Album Premiere playlists, updated with new music daily.