When comparing Hype Machine vs Google Play Music, 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 Google Play Music is ranked 12th. 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 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.
Pro Free no advertisements
Google Play Music is a free service for storing and streaming ones library that has zero advertisements in the interface as well as the playing music.
Pro Instant mixes
Google Play Music can make smart recommendations for playlist by the user just picking an artist or song they want recommendations formed from.
Pro Also offers streaming service
GPM can be used as a normal music player but also as a streaming service like Spotify.
Pro Plays from any source
Plays local music as well as from DLNA sources, so I can play from my home servers as well.
Pro Upload library through browser
Google has added the option of uploading songs through the browser with the help of a Chrome extension download as well as directly through the desktop Chrome app.
Cons
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.
Con Confusing to use
Con No folder support
Con Want credit card info before using "free" service
Con Status bar not sensitive nor customizable
There is no way to go easily go back a specific amount of time (for example: Audible has a button that allows you to go back 30 seconds).
The status bar could be more time specific. If you want to go back to a particular segment of listening, there is no way to know exactly where you will land. You have to do some kind of guessing and it is annoying. Lot of time wasted in searching in a blind manner.
Con Quality only as high as 320kbps MP3s
There is no option to listen to lossless music, even if that is what the user has uploaded. The highest quality is 320kbps MP3s. If a lossless track has been uploaded and the user then downloads the track at a later date the file will also only be a 320kbps MP3.
Con No way to start the app in ones library
The app offers no way to actually start up in ones library, either in the desktop Chrome app or the Android app. For those that only use this app for listening to their purchased or uploaded music this is pretty annoying as there s no real need for the front page of recommendations and activity. This doe snot necessarily need to be some social platform but just a way to listen to ones music, really the user should have the choice, especially if they are paying for this service through purchased music or their streaming service.