The Hype Machine takes to crowdfunding to sustain operations

Greenpoint music website the Hype Machine launched a crowdfunding campaign this week in order to sustain its operations.

One of the older web services around, Hype Machine has curated charts of the most blogged about indie artists since 2005.

“Most of our revenue comes from ads on the desktop site, but due to changes in online advertising, this is no longer enough to support the service,” the company said in its crowdfunding appeal.

https://twitter.com/ystrickler/status/860907362764378112

We profiled Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin in February (How the Hype Machine has persisted and endured) about how his site has been able to withstand all the changes in both the music and advertising industries over the years. Faced with increasing algorithmization of music curation, as with Spotify and Pandora, the Hype Machine has doubled down on humanness: Building a community of real people engaging with the opinions of writers and each other.

“What we’re solving for is that people don’t know what to listen to,” Volodkin said in the piece. “And this problem persists. 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. 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.”

https://twitter.com/whitneymcn/status/860580002982658049

This might be the Hype Machine’s biggest test of its community. It’s looking to reach 1,000 monthly supporters.

Read the Hype Machine's post