Hype Machine // The Interactive Twitter Music Chart
From: Anthony Volodkin – Hype Machine Founder
We’ve been frustrated by a few things about music charts recently. One is the issue of chart integrity, the lines between manipulation & engagement and how to keep such a system honest while rewarding the right people. Another is the terrible quality of most music services powered by Twitter.
Most of them have serious problems. Some don’t reveal the methods or sources in which they’ve gathered their data, just publishing the chart and hoping people would buy it. That prevents the web at large from auditing and finding errors in their methods and work.
Others don’t tell us anything new and don’t account for the social and interactive nature of Twitter, lumping it all together as ‘activity’. So we end up with U2 as the top artist (or Michael Jackson, for the foreseeable future). Finally, the remaining set of tools just implements a file sharing layer on top of Twitter, then allowing others to search for uploaded media. Lame.
Given all this, we did what we usually do when there is music/web stuff out there that sucks: we built our own!
