Like some of the most successful entrepreneurs, Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin got his start by trying to solve an everyday problem. Volodkin was looking for a better way to find cool new music.
On weekends, he traveled to Philadelphia and Boston to see bands like Arcade Fire, Explosions in the Sky, and Mindless Self Indulgence, but stumbling onto the next act to obsess over was tricky. "Music magazines were the result of too many degrees of marketing," he says. "There was nothing I could trust to find something new." At the same time, Volodkin discovered music blogs like Music for Robots and Fluxblog. The only problem was that there were so many of them, it was hard to keep up.
In between classes and shows, Volodkin started to build a website he called Hype Machine. It would display the most recent posts from a selection of music blogs (there are now 1,500 hand-picked by staffers from the dozens of submissions coming in a week), sample the songs, and let visitors see what was popular. The result was an addictive amalgam of Pitchfork and Pandora, but crowd-sourced -- from a discerning crowd.
The lessons of from Napster's demise -- another dorm room-incubated music start-up, which was shut down by court order in 2001 for trading copyrighted material -- were not lost on Volodkin. Rather than dilute revenue from the labels and musicians and draw their ire, Volodkin tried to work within the existing ecosystem. He added links to buy songs from iTunes and Amazon. (The site is free to use. Hype Machine makes its revenue from percentage cut of sales of songs and concert tickets, as well as advertising. The site sells tens of thousands of tracks a month.)
Hype Machine's critical acclaim and play-nice attitude didn't make it any easier for Volodkin to find venture capital funding in the summer of 2007, even from investors that praised the site publicly. But that still leaves the start-up in pretty good company -- Pandora was turned down 350 times before picking up outside financing.
Volodkin responded to rejection like a seasoned entrepreneur, adjusting his strategy and transforming the setback into an asset. "In a weird way, it became a benefit to have some real checks built into the system," says Volodkin, who now has three full-time and two part-time staff, "When you have only a few people to build something, you pick very carefully what you build.
On weekends, he traveled to Philadelphia and Boston to see bands like Arcade Fire, Explosions in the Sky, and Mindless Self Indulgence, but stumbling onto the next act to obsess over was tricky. "Music magazines were the result of too many degrees of marketing," he says. "There was nothing I could trust to find something new." At the same time, Volodkin discovered music blogs like Music for Robots and Fluxblog. The only problem was that there were so many of them, it was hard to keep up.
In between classes and shows, Volodkin started to build a website he called Hype Machine. It would display the most recent posts from a selection of music blogs (there are now 1,500 hand-picked by staffers from the dozens of submissions coming in a week), sample the songs, and let visitors see what was popular. The result was an addictive amalgam of Pitchfork and Pandora, but crowd-sourced -- from a discerning crowd.
The lessons of from Napster's demise -- another dorm room-incubated music start-up, which was shut down by court order in 2001 for trading copyrighted material -- were not lost on Volodkin. Rather than dilute revenue from the labels and musicians and draw their ire, Volodkin tried to work within the existing ecosystem. He added links to buy songs from iTunes and Amazon. (The site is free to use. Hype Machine makes its revenue from percentage cut of sales of songs and concert tickets, as well as advertising. The site sells tens of thousands of tracks a month.)
Hype Machine's critical acclaim and play-nice attitude didn't make it any easier for Volodkin to find venture capital funding in the summer of 2007, even from investors that praised the site publicly. But that still leaves the start-up in pretty good company -- Pandora was turned down 350 times before picking up outside financing.
Volodkin responded to rejection like a seasoned entrepreneur, adjusting his strategy and transforming the setback into an asset. "In a weird way, it became a benefit to have some real checks built into the system," says Volodkin, who now has three full-time and two part-time staff, "When you have only a few people to build something, you pick very carefully what you build.
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