Hype Machine Warns of PR and Marketing Tricks to Game its Charts

Hype Machine’s “Popular” charts are an important metric of how buzzworthy music artists and songs are.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that some PR firms and record labels are now trying to game their rankings to take advantage of this hype.

Founder Anthony Volodkin expressed concerns over some patterns on music blogs and communicated that…

“A handful of labels and PR outlets have focused their efforts on illicitly gaining coverage on Hype Machine-indexed blogs”

Volodkin further communicated that the most common approach is that PR reps or marketers contribute to well established music blogs, then post links to their friends or clients tracks across as many blogs as possible to gain a jump in their rankings artificially.

As a result, blogs who have been actively supporting these types of activities have stopped being indexed by Hype Machine as they didn’t want to encourage this behavior, and instead want the “Popular Charts”to be popular on the artists’ and songs own merits.