SoundCloud and HypeMachine partner up

Looking to help artists and bloggers by detecting SoundCloud player across blogs

Finding and discovering new music has come quite a ways with the rise of social media.  Two very progressive players in the online music space have just announced a partnership which should be of interest to musicians and bloggers a like.  

SoundCloud, an online destination for uploading and sharing music, announced a partnership with The Hype Machine, a site which aggregates the top music being shared throughout thousands of music blogs.

How this partnership can improve the online music discovery space.  The way things work for the most part is a music blogger receives an mp3 pre-release to review and share with his/her readers.  This mp3 gets re-uploaded to some random file sharing site and then linked to in their blog.

SoundCloud and HypeMachine are hoping to eliminate this by using the SoundCloud player as a form of distribution and sharing.  Bloggers will be able to embed the player into their blogs and since the track is coming directly from SoundCloud, artists will be able to get better stats and analytics from SoundCloud about how their music is doing.  And The Hype Machine will be able to detect all embedded SoundCloud players across the blogs it aggregates from.  

A couple artists and labels making use of this at the moment include Massive Attack, and Domino Records.  These artists are basically uploading music to SoundCloud and sharing the embeds with bloggers.  SoundCloud has built new customizable players which it's offering to these paying users, so as an artists you can get these features with a free account (image above).

SoundCloud commented in an email,

"We think this is exciting news. Hype Machine and the music blogs serve a massively important role in fans discovering new and interesting music. It's often the blogosphere that helps new acts break to a wider audience. We're thrilled to be part of that ecosystem by allowing artists and labels to serve tracks directly to music bloggers via SoundCloud. At the same time we hopefully eliminate a lot of the hustle for bloggers themselves having to re-upload tracks to their own servers or use generic file sharing services like supermegasendfile.com."