Photo: Taylor McKnight

The Hype Machine has played a big part in the growth of Nashville Nights and how I interact with music on a daily basis. To celebrate my first 1000 Hypem followers along with the launch of Hype Machine’s iphone app, I had a chat with creator, Anthony Volodkin.
The 25-year-old Volodkin spoke to me from his New York apartment through a Skype video call. Part of me felt like I was speaking to the next Mark Zuckerberg although Volodkin’s social skills vastly out-shined those of the social network creator. Volodkin sat calmly in his desk chair as I asked him questions.
His hair was neatly cut, he wore a plain tee shirt and his room was furnished with small works of art. Aesthetically he is the modern representation of an Internet savvy everyman, yet Volodkin rises above the average in-the-know blog reader. He’s a self employed pioneer and most importantly, a music lover.

First off, what’s a day in the life of Anthony Volodkin look like?

These days it’s a very diverse set of works. When I started Hype Machine I was mostly learning how to program interactive websites. Since I have a technical team to help out with that sort of thing now, for me there’s just a lot of emailing, which sometimes feels like you haven’t done anything all day but actually you’ve talked to all these people and all these things are happening. Whatever needs to happen to make Hype Machine continue, I end up doing that random work.

Do you ever find it hard to squeeze in a music finding session when you have so much work to do?

Doing this really changed how I listened to music. I actually listen to less Hype Machine now because it’s very distracting while I work (laughing). If I’m listening something good, I’ll find my self asking, ‘what is this?’ and stop whatever I was working on.
I’ll usually find new things as I’m testing features on the site.

Are you at a point now where you don’t have to worry about getting another job?

Ya, that’s what I do full time. We’re able to support a few other people working with us so I can help us build a lot of parts in it.

In the ‘07 CNN interview you said Hypem got about 30,000 visitors a day. Has that number grown exponentially since then?

I’m trying to remember how many a day…I know we get a little under 2 million unique visitors each month, so in a day, close to 100,000. The monthly number is a lot more standard.

During the programming phase, did you hit any walls that made it hard to keep moving forward?

Initially, probably the toughest thing was learning how to build anything so the site would work quickly, having the pages load quickly or dealing with issues like having too many people at once.
The thing that has come closest to a give-up point is just the overall relationship between indie music on the web, indie listeners and a very local mainstream audience of listeners and music. I like all kinds of music but in terms of demographics and how many people are into each particular thing makes for conflicting demands because you want to reach the highest number of people possible. But once you learn only a certain number of people are into independent stuff and to get that large number requires a total switch of everything to something more mainstream, it becomes difficult. You wonder which side you’re on. For me, I don’t see it like that. It’s all culture.

Do you ever worry about the Hype Machine peaking at a certain style? The top 100 always having the same sounds in it?

I found that over time, we’ve been able to have it vary. That’s kinda the biggest challenge, to make sure the things in the popular page are a mixture of things new, old, strange or more understandable. We’re about to release this big algorithm update for how the popular tracks are figured out. There’ve been some changes since the redesign. I do see that as a threat though, the idea of Hype Machine is to be really eclectic so you would want to find things there you wouldn’t find otherwise if you went to the usual places you find music. It has to be really mixed. We definitely think about this a lot.

You think there will ever be a music outlet where you can purchase music as quickly as you hear about it? Sometimes I’ll want to buy a release but it’ll have a territory restriction making it almost impossible to obtain without piracy. Will there ever be a music outlet as immediate as the attention span of the reader?

It’s possible. I think we’re doing a lot better about this now than we were a couple years ago. The reason this happens is because a band has a distributor in each territory (the US, the UK, Western Europe etc). The distributor makes its own deals with whoever sells the mp3s. A lot of the newer artists don’t have this limitation, they just work with someone worldwide and they can get these things published at the same time in all stores. When we do the album premieres a week before the release, we can only do it with people who have a worldwide release because we can’t tell half of our audience something is coming out and then the other half, just kinda pretend it didn’t happen (laughing). We throw that demand back at them and usually it’s all on one day. It’s released in a lot of places on Mondays, and then on Tuesday in the US, because we like to do Tuesdays here. I think there’s a lot of positive motion in that direction.

Do you think the digital era of music discovery has shortened the lifespan of the music we listen to?

I think it puts more pressure on the artist to make lasting music. Because of the speed of the content consumption you have to make something that resonates, or has more meaning across a period of time. If you don’t, the more rapidly changing new information is going to overwhelm what you’ve made. I think it in itself doesn’t make it shorter or more disposable but I think the people who were making more disposable music before encounter difficulties because now the system kind of eats them.

Can you name any bands you would say, “that’s our baby” or they made it on this ad because of us, or because they got to no. 1 on the popular chart?

There’ve been a lot of bands like this over the years. Some examples like Black Kids, Cold War Kids and I think back a while ago, Gnarls Barkley in ’07. I think it’s difficult to take credit for a specific one because usually a band’s success is made through a number of Internet mediums like youtube, blogs and facebook. If they do that, then they can be successful because people see them everywhere. Hype Machine is one of those places, although I don’t think one site in particular has that power, although [if that were the case] I think that’d be really fun to talk about.

Are you ever worried the bigger you get the closer you are to getting shut down?

I’m not so worried about that. We’ve worked with a number of big and small labels for our album premieres and we deliver them a lot of value. There’s a variety of things we provide to them and there’s a lot of music on blogs sent to them by labels or promoters. The argument that Hype Machine is all about music that’s being promoted is really valid one. We’re not concerned about the size and being shut down as an issue. We’re really different from a service like Groove Shark or all these other services where you can listen to things for free for kind of no reason. There are a number of things you can’t do from Hype Machine that are very intentional. You can’t download music straight from it, you can’t make playlists out of music and you can’t get full albums of music. All these things that you can’t do aren’t because we aren’t aloud to do them, it’s all been carefully considered.

Are there any arguments you’d like to address but you’ve never had a platform to? For instance the 1000timesyes guy, I don’t really understand what his beef is with you guys, but he really hates you guys (laughing).

You can’t really take that video too seriously, he was having a lot of fun with that. Once you get to know him better, it was basically trolling in a talk forum. It was fun. I think he was concerned. There’s always a panel about this at SXSW, saying how music bloggers are replacing music critics and those are the people upset because they don’t have jobs anymore. It’s not a particularly productive commentary. I think he may have thought it’d be a good idea to pick us as kind of the symbol of a lot of these changes. I don’t really have a lot of beef.

Do you think blogging has the ability to rise above the standards it’s been given; passionate promotion of music instead of just short blurbs and mp3s?

I think we have that today. One example is Said the Gramophone. It’s true to it’s original format, there’s amazing writing, they pick really interesting acts but the problem is that isn’t what can move a lot of traffic. Stereogum, even though it’s a quality publication still does not quite get up to that high of a level of quality because A.) you have to maintain a volume of posting and B.) you become restricted in terms of what music you can post because your audience has to kind of ‘get it’ and then come back.
Whereas someone like Said the Gramophone isn’t so concerned about metrics and all these things so he just picks awesome things he likes. I think it’s possible and the internet makes this very easy and not very expensive to do but the other question is whether it’s ultimately what people want. And for a lot of people the answer is unfortunately ‘No,’ which is really frustrating.

What’s your opinion on sites that put out around 10 posts a day, churning out mp3s?

I think that’s their reaction to the volume problem I’ve outlined. They try to keep up and compete with the traffic by posting more.

Do you think that’s hurting the artists? Hurting the way we listen to music or the lifespan of music, or just exposing more artists that wouldn’t otherwise be talked about?

I think it becomes easy to get drowned in the volume of both as a listener and as an artist because if you’re posting all this stuff all the time, who’s gonna have the time to listen to it all and think about it all and figure out what they like out of it all?
So I think it kinda becomes a race to the bottom if you participate in that process because even though in the short term you may get more feedback and more activity because you’ve posted more, I think the people that will be successful ultimately are the ones who carefully filter and select things because they become known as someone who selects certain things, or gets a name for doing that and takes what they write really seriously so I think posting a ton takes away from peoples ability to build brands and have others consider them seriously. That’s why we pick the blogs manually. It would be easier to just include everything, every single music blog out there but I don’t think we’d be better off as Hype Machine or people who use Hype Machine to have everything.

How many people go into the deciding factor for letting in new blogs?

It’s mostly Zoya. She’s our editor if you will and she kind of figures out what the best blogs are to have in the system for a very balanced overview of what is going on. I think that’s difficult for a lot of people to understand because they think we should add their indie-electro blog too because we have a few already, and we’re like, “Well you see…” (laughing) that argument already is bad. They don’t understand that’s not a good thing.

Is design an important part of choosing blogs?

It’s kind of a holistic approach. If you have a particularly ugly site, something really awful, it makes it really difficult to add you. We wouldn’t recommend that and I don’t think other people would recommend that. I think the same is true with certain kinds of writing or imagery. Some sites have less writing but really interesting images they add next to the song, which is fine. We are into that too. There just has to be something special about it to make it worthwhile.

Is the site pretty much at where you want it right now or are there a lot more upcoming developments?

There is a process of planning the next sixth months, we’re adding facebook connect for instance and finishing up an iphone app. It’s difficult because whenever working on stuff like this, you’re never done, so realizing that and learning not to hurry too much is important. There’s always something better we can do to improve certain things.

Have you guys ever thought about going outside the site with something like your own music blog, Internet radio or record label?

There are some kinds of work we don’t really want to do. I think running a record label is one of those types. Once you learn about how the business works and everything on the record label side, you realize, well maybe we’d be able to make money with the publishing but the actual recording music as a business, not doin’ so well.
So that’s one answer to that but we’ve been thinking about creating more high quality interaction experiences around music that we can build with the Hype Machine team that people aren’t currently making. We’ve spent all this time thinking about music online, what products are cool or not and what works. It seems really tempting to try out some of the ideas that benefit from that learning. So stay tuned for more things we’ll make. Some of them may not be under the Hype Machine name but we’ll work together on those as a team.

Sometimes I struggle between deciding whether or not to post uncleared material or material that wasn’t sent to me directly. It’s become standard to post a 192kb ‘sample.’ What do you think is the best middle ground between not leaking 320kb songs and not relying solely on your mailbox?

A lower quality is an interesting point. If you have 128kb, that’s a decent bassline. It depends on the type of music. Certain types sound noticeably worse at 128 but that’s definitely more of an exception. Things have gotten a lot better. For most new stuff, there’s one or two tracks people are really excited to share or give away free. I think it’s becoming a lot easier to keep everyone happy.

No matter how common it becomes, I’m still paranoid about posting work from mainstream artists that isn’t cleared. Do record labels still care about this as much or have they embraced low bitrate mp3 samples?

I think the quality is less of an issue. It’s really whether it’s something authorized or something that’s been released already. I think the worst thing is when there’s a leak and people are posting random tracks from the leaked album. That’s probably one of the few times we get requests to remove links from our site. We’ve removed some blogs who very aggressively do this. We don’t want to encourage that behavior. I think it gets criminal when it’s an unreleased recording.

Is there any way to monitor leaked material or are there too many blogs to police this sort of thing?

That’s something we can’t currently do. The volume of the posting is such that it’s really difficult to tell. Even looking at the list as a person it’s hard to tell which ones are supposed to be there and which ones are not. We’re working to add a feature where if someone requests a link to be removed, we will then remove subsequent reposts of the same piece of information, just as a token of good faith, keeping the intentions of the DMCA. They have to tell us first though, if something needs to happen.

Did you know about Elbo.ws when you were starting the Hype Machine? Did it have any influence on the site?

It’s actually an awesome story. It apparently was developed literally in the same few weeks that I was working on Hype Machine. I was working on it in mid April of ’05. At the end of April it started making the rounds on the Internet because I showed it to a few people and then there was a post on may 2nd on Stereogum about Hype Machine and in the comments someone mentions Elbo.ws. I started looking at Elbo.ws and it turned out it was really built during the same few weeks and completed around the end of April too. I love Brandon, who does that. We definitely have a quality relationship where we try to do different things and try to think about things differently. I’m sure there are some influences that go back and forth because it’s a very similar challenge but the ‘Oh they totally ripped us off!’ thing has never happened with them.

Well thanks again, I’ll keep in touch! I’m excited to hear about all the new developments.

Cool, thanks for the good questions man!

The Hype Machine Iphone App is now available in the Apple store.
This week’s album premiere is Friendly Fires – Pala.

Follow Nashville Nights on Hype Machine.