Hype Machine

And without really knowing a lot of people or, or, like, using a lot of my network, actually not at all, um, just putting music out, and it organically happened on SoundCloud.

It organically happened on YouTube and Hype Machine back then and those things, and that's very rewarding for me as well.

Hmm.

So how did you go about crafting your own, like, style of how you were gonna make your music? Was it something that just, like, evolved over time? Did you have a direction you set out to go in and then it kind of just was refined? Like, how did you come up with the style that people know and love today?

I was on a panel at South by Southwest with some very bright young minds.

I think it was, uh, a gentleman from Hype Machine, a gentleman from SoundCloud, and, um, and a, and a gent from Last.fm, and we were all riffing about interactive music or playing with music as it's sometimes referred to.

And this idea that part of your fandom means expressing yourself through the music of the artist that you love.

Mm.

We loved, uh, indie electronic music.

There was this chart called Hype Machine, which was the first viral chart of, of the internet.

This is way before streaming.

And basically, how you were charted on this...

The, the algorithm was basically how many times a certain amount of blogs posted about you, and then that's how you entered the chart, and then how many likes you got on that chart.

So what we would do is we'd go to all these artists, 'cause we loved all the music that was being posted on this chart, and we'd beg them to do remixes.

And then Alex went in the back end of Hype Machine, and he found every kid that wrote for every blog that, uh, they pulled music from.

And, you know, we'd make this remix of a song they were already posting about, and then he would write them these hilarious emails, like, super personalized.