When comparing 8 Tracks vs Hype Machine, the Slant community recommends Hype Machine for most people. In the question“What are the best ways of finding new music?” Hype Machine is ranked 7th while 8 Tracks is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Hype Machine is:
Hype Machine looks at content of hundreds of blogs and ranks songs by how often they are mentioned on these blogs.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Individualistic and personalized user playlists
The site is human-curated not automated. This can give a more personal feel, as each playlist on the music streaming service has been curated by a user.
Pro Great for discovering new music
Due to how the service works, listening to user created playlists allows for pretty good discovery of new or undiscovered bands.
Pro Scrapes almost 800 blogs
Hype Machine looks at content of hundreds of blogs and ranks songs by how often they are mentioned on these blogs.
Pro In-depth tags system
The music's tagged based on genres, location, blogs, novelty and other miscellaneous information.
Pro Cross-platform
In addition to being available on the web, Hype Machine can be accessed via mobile applications for iOS, Android, Windows Phone & BlackBerry, through Spotify, using OS X & Windows clients and on Sonos.
Pro Personalized
Contrary to what is said in the Cons, one can personalize Hype Machine to the prefered music style. This can be done by following specific blogs writing on this style, then one will have newly discovered artists in one's feed. And it works pretty well, you can discover dozens of bands like this and buy their albums afterwards.
Cons
Con Poor music streaming service outside of North America
8Tracks has changed its policy for how it supplies music to those outside of North America by not using any of their servers for those users. This change resulted in using Youtube for those users in order to still have a way to add songs to playlists. Sadly using Youtube results in many songs just disappearing and many playlists becoming defunct.
Con Advertisements in free version
Con No way to find certain songs
8 Tracks allows you to search for a playlist based on keywords, then requires you to listen to most of that playlist without skipping. As such, it's not so good for hunting down a specific song, but is great for discovering new music.
Con Not personalized
Music recommendations don't take your tastes into account, meaning this feed just shows what's trending on blogs in your country / in the genre you filtered by. This means you get a lot of false positives if your tastes aren't mainstream.
