A collection of the very best music of 2010 as picked by music bloggers. Featuring original artwork, full album streams, and DJ mixes created forThe Hype Machine.
The Zeitgeist is here! Our annual roundup of the 50 most-discussed artists, albums, and songs of 2010 launches today. Well reveal 10 every day this week, with the Top 10 being released on Friday. Heres how we made it:
Top 50 Artists: Weve tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2010 by blogs on The Hype Machine, and invited 50 visual artists to create illustrations for the musicians. You can view them in glorious full-screen resolution while you sample a track from the band. AND! This year, you can send each gorgeous piece of artwork as a postcard to your friends. Its the closest you can get to hugging a pixel.
Top 50 Albums: Weve pored over 950 blogger Top 10 lists (the most to date!) and thousands of albums to calculate the final ranking. Grooveshark kindly provided the full album streams, and weve used CC-licensed Flickr Photos for the graphics.
Top 50 Songs: Were excited to present five new mixes of the years top songs, created for us by the artists who were dominating the Popular charts in 2010.
As always, the Zeitgeist is one big community effort. Big thanks to all the music bloggers, who make finding the best new music easier; the illustrators and photographers, who make the Zeitgeist look so good; Jeff fromHeart On A Stick, who passed the torch a few years back; David fromLargehearted Boy, who is the best at collecting best-of lists; Grooveshark (and @bwc), who power the full album streams, SoundCloud, who power the Hype Machine Radio Show; our incredible friends Cain Norris,Michael Bringardner, Lisa Zuniga, Morgan Kelton, and Emma Tangoren for helping us with data slicing and dicing; the entire Hype Machine team, for working through Christmas and New Years, every year, to bring you the Zeitgeist. And you: thank you for always looking for new music to fall in love with.