The defacto musicblog aggregrator the Hype Machine has updated their site with a new look and feel, including personalized user accounts which let users “love” their favourite tracks and share them with others.

It’s been interesting to watch the progression of the site over the last couple weeks since they released the update. The initial version scrapped their Flash popup player and judging by the feedback, people were not too pleased. They’ve subsequently updated the site to include a popup player which plays all the music links on a given page.

There seems to be a dichotomy in the music blog space. The tradition - as espoused by the Hype Machine is to provide context with the music. The music is an equal to the blog commentary and the two should be packaged together regardless of how or where the actual consumption ends up taking place.

Then there is an entirely different group of people who are really just in it for the music - they can’t be bothered to read or find stuff themselves. They like music blogs for the euphoria of hearing new music and prefer to just listen via the popup player.

The Flash music player we’ve been developing at Yahoo! should appeal to the latter group. You can point it at any webpage, RSS or ATOM feed, or a playlist format like ASX, M3U, PLS or XSPF.

<embed src=”http://webjay.org/flash/xspf_player” width=”100%” height=”220″ wmode=”transparent” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer” flashvars=”playlist_url=http://www.stereogum.com/&rounded_corner=1″ />

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