talking to the hypemachine

Facebook, twitter and all the other social web-things bring a lot of news to our eyes and ears. Since I am a bit of a sucker for music, I couldn’t help but stumble across the hypemachine, a tool that scans blogs for new music. And it so does the trick, all fresh and so clean! I totally fell for that tool simply because I dig discovering – a lot of the stuff is really unheard of in the online music store near you.

The guy behind the hype, Anthony, happened to appear in our Vienna office a few weeks ago, because he virtually befriended Lukas, a dear collegue of mine. Of course I had to leap at the chance of talking to him on his little stop-over during an extensive trip around good old europe.We sat down and I started asking…

AvQ: Hey Anthony, pleasure to meet you! You’re only 23 years old and already managed to pull off a pretty amazing stint as a music slash internet guru. That’s pretty impressive – how did it all start?

Anthony: Well, I was at Uni, it was the year 2005 and I was really bored with music, frustrated at the IT work I was doing then and basically wanted to improve either one of those two, uhm, situations. Myspace was kinda messy and magazines and radio didn’t do it for me cause they were just not edgy and up-to-date enough. So I sat down, looked around and started to find gazillions of music blogs that held a lot of real gems and showed a high level of knowledge and some really cool shit.

AvQ: So, then you just built the hypemachine?

Anthony: Not straight away, I first used writing code as an excuse to escape uni-work, it was an ideal way to procrastinate. Then I came up with a first, very simple machine, that could already aggregate music from blogs. And many people thought it was cool. It kept me going through a shitty semester and once I missed a pretty important physics exam cause I did pull a few all-nighters to get hypemachine on track. I told the professor why I missed the exam and he liked what I was doing. All that made me wanna take things a lot further.

AvQ: How did you come up with the name then?

Anthony: That came totally natural. I mean, you take what’s happening in the music world, that strong trend of indie music and people coming from who knows where with really awsome stuff and and find a way to automise it. A machine that show’s what’s hip. Hypemachine. We want people to access what’s new – not in the old fashioned top-down way, but in the way it’s really happening today.

AvQ: There’s more music on blogs than  in So what kinda music can we find on hypem.com?

Anthony: Definitely not the artists that really want to be there… Indie Rock, Electro, Techno, not the stuff that gets a lot of airplay. People writing music blogs are usually totally in love with what they do, so we want to give everybody a chance who can prove prime insight into whatever genre floats his/her boat. But bloggers have to apply cause we want to keep the standard high. So Zoya, a friend who went to college with me, was really into the music as well and started picking the blogs cause there were so many.

AvQ: and today…?

Anthony: Today, hypem.com has around 250.000 registered users, and about 1,5 Million unique visitors per month. We kept the initial design and it became a pretty strong brand. So we started doing merhandise like T-Shirts and rad necklaces made from vinyl. It’s really starting to roll and by integrating twitter, we introduced a cool new feature: if you link hypem to your twitter account, the songs you love show up in your twitter feed and even create charts. All that is happening now is amazing, and I’m fascinated* that a passion turned into an actual business!

Anthony on hypem.com

AvQ on hypem.com