I just met up with Anthony Volodkin, the Hype Machine guy, who's nearing the end of his computer science degree and has just done a term at Queen Mary's. Like many of the best web phenomena, he started the site out of frustration that he needed the things he used to work a bit better.
He was scanning sites to find out what music people were talking about, but wanted them all to come to him. That's what Hype Machine does; blogs are listed with the site and then whenever they post a new entry linking to an MP3, the details are listed on Hype Machine.
That list is pretty brief: the name of the blog, the name of the post, the name of the tune and then, retailers will be pleased to hear, links to listen to the track and buy it on Amazon or iTunes.
Being a New Yorker, Anthony grew up with what he says is crap American radio, unlike music radio in the UK and the glorious BBC. Hence Hype Machine's strapline - "It's like radio that doesn't suck" - not sitting quite as well over here. But we'll overlook that.
The rights debate is a very long one, as we know, but Anthony is clued up. All the blogs the site links to (and there are more than 1000) have to be approved before they are included on the site, so that means Anthony is applying some kind of quality control to make sure these bloggers have been going for a while and aren't likely to stall after a few months - and aren't just plugging links to bundles of zipped audio files.
He's a bit sceptical about the mainstream music press because the journalists are too close to the industry, he says. It's all a big, exclusive cycle of tip-offs and marketing that tends to be too focused on the next big thing.
I assumed that much of that music would be new, indy music, but Anthony's outlook is a bit different. He reckons there's so much music out there already that he doesn't know about, he's really more interested in the old stuff. And that all fits in with what we know about the web and the long tail.
I'm glad he mentioned old music, because that's my kind of thing. (I got to introduce him to Tom Waits who is labelled in my iTunes collection as iTunes "late night gravelly bar blues".) Anthony also discovered a whole new world in Arthur Lee and Love when the singer died in August this year.
Anthony is going to confirm the stats for me but the site peaks at around 50,000 unique users a day. He reckons at least three quarters of that is US traffic, and a big chunk of the remainder is UK. The only ads on the site at the moment and Google Ads, but there are already potential investors sniffing around.
Anyway, Hype Machine is a site about buzz, which is why it commands great respect. He won't link to obviously illegally copied music, and will remove links to illegal stuff if it is flagged up. The point, he argues, is that the site is driving online music sales more than it is undermining them.
More than that, this is just the kind of project that big music companies should be investing time and creative energy into, but none of them can quite seem to pull this off - partly because they can't seem to break out of the corporate mindset and partly because web users often have more trust in smaller, web-only brands.
