In the process of compiling our various contributions to the Bloglin’s Best 100 albums of 2009, I think we all scoped our fair share of already published lists. Many proved expected and ultimately forgettable, and a handful left me truly impressed, but none so much as music blog aggregator Hype Machine’s 2009 Music Blog Zeitgeist. Not only was it the most populist of lists that dicumented a wide spectrum of music opinion from the greater blogosphere, but it was also hands down the best designed year end list.

For those of you who’ve yet to dive into the immersive waters of Hype Machine, I think founder Anthony Volodkin best summarized his own creation in 2007 in an interview with Wired Magazine when he stated:

For me, the most memorable discovery experiences are the result of some kind of late night browsing session when you click on a bunch of links and you’re not sure how you got there … (and then it’s) “Whoa, what is this!?” And that’s the moment that Hype Machine wants to replicate, over and over.

Volodkin, a Russian immigrant, was only 21 years old at the time of that interview, making him just a teenager in 2005 when he launched what has grown into a 1.7 million unique views a month destination for a music-hungry, digitally savvy public. Hype Machine works by live indexing the posts of selected music bloggers across genre and geographic boundaries. Posts are cached from their original sources with tracks available for streamed listening via song players, a practice that both legally protects Hype Machine and protects the bandwidth of the indexed bloggers. Volodkin and his team are able to profit via affiliate deals with online music retailers like iTunes, Amazon and eMusic.

Volodkin’s formula has proven both simple and successful. Browse or search the database, streaming songs of your choosing and click the associated links to purchase full albums or read more from the bloggers who loved the same tracks that caught your ears. At a first glance it might seem easy to write off Hype Machine as a repository for buzz bands, but underneath the popular names of the day you will find a layer upon layer of your own favorite artists mixed amongst the brand new (but not yet known), the obscure and the forgotten but now remembered.

Hype Machine approached their 2009 Music Blog Zeitgeist with the same automation with personality approach that defines the larger site. In the categories of Top Songs, Top Artists and Top Albums of the year, creativity merged with statistics in a gloriously presented cornucopia of visuals and user interface. The Top Songs category pinpointed what were the 39 most popular tracks on the site across 2009, judged by a month-to-month analysis of overall song plays and favoriting (loved) clicks by registered users. The Top Song listing was accompanied by a special edition of Hype Machine Radio that featured all the listed songs in an easily digestible mix.

The Top 50 Artists were counted down 20 entries a day across last week, decided by frequency of posts by the Hype Machine blogbase. It was the standard formula of anticipatory countdown, but made memorable with the commissioning of 50 artists and designers who created visual interpretations of the listed musicians. The double layer of anticipation eliminated the possibility of getting bored by yet another list and I admit to becoming more invested in the art than the music countdown as the unveil progressed. A few of my favorites included Stephanie Davidson’s Yeasayer, Victor Timofeev’s Beach House and Mark Silipo’s Royksopp.

Several weeks back Hype Machine encouraged bloggers both in and outside of their network to submit a link to their blog posts containing their personal Top 10 Album lists. From the pool of 550 submitted lists, Hype Machine assigned point rankings based on how many bloggers chose the album and how high on their lists it ranked. The albums scoring the highest point numbers became Hype Machine’s Top 50 Albums. It was in this category that all the strengths of Hype Machine were immediately obvious. Hype Machine partnered with Groove Shark to provide full streams of every album on the list within its visual entry. Background images for entries were Creative Commons licensed flickr photos. Additionally, blogger quotes ran alongside links to every list mention, viewable in their originally published state. A second special edition of Hype Machine Radio aired on Friday and spoke with six bloggers who shared their opinions on the merits of the top ten listed albums against a backdrop of related musical snippets.

The Hype Machine’s Music Blog Zeitgeist was the most important music-focused year-end list to come out of 2009. Masquerading under the unassuming titles of Top Albums, Artists and Songs, it was, in it’s larger role, an encapsulated view of a year’s worth of digital music trends and a forecast for the continued intersection of technology, creative endeavors, copyright and commerce in the year ahead.

- Scrooge McFuck