A VC« The NYC Developer Dilemma | Main | Oh My Konokos »
Hyping The Hype Machine
John Heilemann says that I said the Hype Machine "is the best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones!"
I suppose I may have been that exuberant. I do love the Hype Machine. But so does John and his piece in this month's Business 2.0 is well worth a read if you want to understand how aggregating user generated content is going to reshape the entertainment business in the coming years.
Comments (4) | Posted October 9, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
From the article:
The old kind, of course, was dominated by magazines such as Rolling Stone. But now those publications seem archaic, antiquated - irrelevant, in a word. (As Volodkin puts it, making me feel like Father Time, "I don't think I've ever looked at a magazine to check out new music; that must've been cool!") And they've left behind a vacuum that the Hype Machine could readily fill.
++++++
>>> Interesting. Aggregators like the Hype Machine and the individual audio blogs themselves have upped my interesting music magazines that cover artists I am first exposed to on the blogs.
"The Fader", "XLR8R", "URB", "Re:UP", many other smaller pubs I consume more vigorously now because I am into more artists that are covered in their pages, and I am aware of the artists and interested from the blogs first.
So online media consumption is driving offline print, in this instance.
Best, Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Fishman | Oct 10, 2006 8:05:24 AM
I've been playing around with THM a bit more and I do like it a lot, both practically and conceptually. My 2 concerns tho are (1) there's no incentive for users to buy the music (as MP3 can be easily downloaded from the underlying blog), and (2) I'm pretty sure that RIAA can successfully go after THM based on the Grokster ruling (at last from my admittedly non-legal reading of that decision).
Posted by: David Porter | Oct 11, 2006 1:05:43 PM
i frankly see hype machine as a substitute for purchasing music -- it essentially offers on-demand listening to thousands of songs -- precisely what the DMCA does _not_ permit.
whether or not they can survive on technicalities, it definitely violates the spirit of the law.
i don't necessarily agree with the law -- indeed, i was the president of DiMA, the RIAA's chief antagonist, at the time, and nearly testified in the Senate against them.
But it is law. And hype machine strikes me as less than fair.
On this one, Fred, we just have to disagree.
(ps hi, david!)
Posted by: Nicholas | Oct 11, 2006 9:54:20 PM
I subscribed to the auto-update Hype Machine Podcast feed, which has changed my ability to find new music more than Pitchfork, Gorilla vs. Bear and many other amazing music blogs, which took to much time to find the good stuff. Someone give the guy a bag of cash and resources to make Hype even better, hell I'll give up my Rhapsody account for this in two seconds.
Posted by: David Evans | Oct 25, 2006 11:54:55 AM
Main RSS Feed of All Posts
VC and Technology Posts Only
