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Add to SafariWhen comparing Hype Machine vs SoundCloud, the Slant community recommends SoundCloud for most people. In the question“What are the best ways of finding new music?” SoundCloud is ranked 2nd while Hype Machine is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose SoundCloud is:
Links to related music, based on what you're listening to, can be found in the sidebar.
Specs
Question 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 Recommendations
Links to related music, based on what you're listening to, can be found in the sidebar.
Pro Subscribe to artists
You can subscribe to artists to be notified the instant they upload a new song or give an update.
Pro Explore tab has new music constantly
Explore tab on SoundCloud shows trending music that can be filtered based on genre/tag. There's a constant stream of new music.
Pro Follow people
You can follow people with similar tastes or that often find new music. When they favorite a song, SoundCloud will notify you about it.
Pro Free to use
You don't even have to log in or sign up for an account if you don't want to.
There are paid options for if you want to upload large quantities of audio (eg if you're a music label you'll need this), but it's free to download as much and as often as you like.
Pro Pre-releases
Some music labels, especially newer ones, release on SoundCloud before anywhere else.
Pro Creative Commons filter
SoundCloud allows for finding music that is licensed under Creative Commons.
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 Can't do an advanced search
You can't search, for example, for Creative Commons music with the tag #trap. It could be useful to search for music you like that is under Creative Commons.
Con Interface is full of bugs
The SoundCloud website has tons of problems, including issues with notifications, favorites, and uploading sounds.
Con Audio ads in some uploaded content
Some content on SoundCloud includes audio ads, particularly sponsored podcasts.
(Note that SoundCloud itself doesn't add these - all the audio you're hearing is exactly as it was uploaded.)
