Volodkin emailed the program he built to a handful of people to see what they thought, and from there his experience seems to have reflected that of future unknown bands who suddenly finds themselves at the top of the Hype Machine’s chart. The first version of Hype Machine was really just an RSS feed of what the blogs were covering, he said.

So Volodkin made a tool to index what they were writing about. We were doing that before and it still makes sense today because the platforms that people are using for music don’t really do a good job with that.” In our case we give you suggestions based on what everyone is writing about. We don’t care about your existing preferences, we want to show you what’s out there. “What we’re solving for is that people don’t know what to listen to,” Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin said recently over coffee in Greenpoint. As music blogs tend to be on the early adopter side of the industry, the songs you hear on the Hype Machine’s popular playlist are unlikely to be those you hear on the radio, or Spotify for that matter. The more blogs are writing about a particular song, the higher it is on the Hype Machine’s Popular chart. The Greenpoint-based Hype Machine is a website that conglomerates music blogs and forms music charts out of what the blogs are covering.

In the oncoming labor battle between man and machine, man can look to Greenpoint’s Hype Machine as one example, at least, of a space where us ol’ sapiens still got it on the bots.

Hype machine