Hype Machine and Versioning

It would be easy to say that Hype Machine, the brilliant blog-skimming site started by Anthony Volodkin, is something like the future of music and/or something like the future of songs.  And it’s no doubt directional in some sense.  And yet it’s both more and less than that at the same time and that’s kind of what’s interesting about it.  In a way, it opens the door to a new dialogue about the nature of one specific song and what a song means and how different versions relate back to the original author.

Because, on Hype Machine, there are a multiplicity of versions of any one song.  And then you have the blog that posted the song.  You see, the same song on two different blogs is really almost two separate instances.  This point is underscored by the Twitter charts which don’t chart a specific song, per se, but a specific instance of a song as posted on a specific blog.  I think this is very much a good thing.  It lends uniqueness, in its own bizarre digital way, to that instance as posted on the blog and creates a kind of digital scarcity.

And, at the same time, almost because Hype Machine isn’t pointing to one standard version of a song, one master, so to speak, it seems best positioned not for the codified authentic first instance (although it’s obviously used for that too) but as a compendium of different versions and remixes, in addition to the original instance of a song.  You can see it when you surf through.

It would be wrong and sort of strange to try and supplement Hype Machine for iTunes, Spotify, or a more structured formal music service.  It’s noisier, more chaotic and, in its way, more fun than that.  And it underscores a future for songs and musicians that is, again, not about one single instance of anything (as an LP or CD is) but rather as an ongoing conversation.  A game of telephone.  A strange and mercurial iterative take on art that presents it not as unassailable and unimpeachable but rather as the opposite.  As a fluid moment in time and a cluster of instances rather than any one specific instance.

This is feeling kind of cerebral and abstract so let me see if I can distill it a bit.  The point is that the Internet, and services that make use of it like Hype Machine, allow for a near infinite number of versions of any given artifact, like songs.  And so any service that is aggregating a bunch of different blogs and inputs is collating all these different versions in one place and the idea that there is one standard version of anything is replaced by the idea that there is kind of an ongoing conversation or theme (like a song) and that theme is added to and subtracted to by all the various participants in the conversation (like music bloggers and remixers and DJs and other folk) and where there was once one now there are many.

Put an even simpler way.  There are lots of different versions of songs on Hype Machine and it’s kind of cool.  And I think it means something but I’m not sure what.  But it has something to do with permanence and transience and nodes in a network and fluid knowledge and rates of change and games of telephone.

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