[music playing] ANTHONY VOLODKIN: There's so much music online, and it's so easy to make music that you have to find a way to sort through it all.
RYAN DOMBAL: That's why I use blogs are valuable, even the smaller ones, because there's so much.
JON COHEN: I think there's more of a flood of exciting music than ever before.
BLAKE WHITMAN: The technology is there.
The tools are there.
It's really up to people themselves to collaborate and make something incredible.
[music playing] JON COHEN: In the '90s in the heyday of the music business, the industry had big mass drivers.
You had a very healthy and thriving MTV.
Radio was incredibly powerful.
You had such a huge proliferation of labels.
More and more artists were being signed.
It was competitive, but it was the kind of era where you can discover something before anyone else.
I think if you look at what's happening right now, there's a huge flood.
I mean, there's so many more artists out there.
That creates a lot of opportunity for a lot of bands and it opens the doors for so many acts, but it also makes it harder and harder to have really big mainstream stars.
I think now, that whole economy scales changed dramatically.
Today's businesses enabled lot of smaller, independent labels to be more successful, because the way they can compete with some of the bigger labels has really kind of equalized, and more acts can take control their own destiny.
So I think the consumer relies more and more on curators to help guide them as to what's real and what's good.
I think what's really exciting is that you're going to see such a bigger connection across music.
RYAN DOMBAL: I think right now it is a free for all online, and it's great.
But it also can be troublesome, because there are a lot artists who are trying to get their music out there.
There's this one rapper called Lil B.
He just keep putting stuff out.
Like, he must put out a mix tape maybe every couple months.
At one point, I think he had 200 different Myspace accounts.
But, that said, how do you differentiate between what people would actually want to listen to and follow and get behind.
People like me are hopefully useful in that I can guide them in the right way.
I was actually reading an issue of Spin from the early '90s, and I feel like they probably had about 20 reviews.
We do five reviews a day, so 25 a week, so a hundred a month, so 1,200 reviews.
The change has been-- there's just so much more music out there, so I feel like the idea of a filter or curator is that much more important.
BLAKE WHITMAN: It's amazing to see people thinking outside the traditional box that they've always kind of been in with music video, which is a band or artist playing a song in a field or whatever, and sort of get away from that and start exploring a different type of music video in general.
The types of people that we see on Vimeo are an amazing rise of young individuals who are making these music videos that are changing the game in a certain way.
Since largely these videos are created by one, two, maybe three individuals, they have total control.
It's a lot easier for a band or musician to talk with one person as opposed to a director, and a producer, and an agency, and a big budget.
So there's an intimacy there that I think has really rekindled a whole new way of telling stories.
When people start to experiment, you start to see a very interesting end product.
One prime example is artists hacking connect boxes.
That's amazing.
People are taking a video game, they're hacking it, and they're making it into an art form.
Because potentially, you can be discovered through that.
And with the technologies like Photoshop and After Effects and CINEMA 4D, you can fuse a lot of this stuff together to create something entirely new very easily.
It really has democratized this whole process and allowed anyone to show what they do and it's really seen an explosion of a ton of new creativity.
It's been really exciting to see.
ANTHONY VOLODKIN: Hype Machine came from the frustration with the slowness of how culture and music gets talked about.
I felt like I couldn't turn to magazines to find something new, and I stumbled into a bunch of these music blogs.
There was just a few hundred of them that would have this small community that had no central place.
And so I started working on a very early prototype of what is today Hype Machine, and my goal was just not to miss anything on music blogs.
It brings together new postings from blogs all over the world.
We also compile a chart of the most popular bands.
We're kind of the filter of the filter.
We curate the curators.
A lot of the tools out there today are really focused on showing your music that your friends are into, but the thing that you couldn't do before is find what music people that you don't know are listening to.
The spectrum is much broader than the past, because the web was a lot more open with how and who can participate.
And it's really interesting to know what all these people think is cool in a group.
JON COHEN: Now if something is great here in New York City, people in Australia and London know about it within days.
RYAN DOMBAL: People just have more awareness of what's going on.
This idea of talking about music has gotten bigger.
ANTHONY VOLODKIN: So many people, like me, are working on more efficient ways of finding the new things and consuming the new things.
BLAKE WHITMAN: It's really early still, and the potential of new forms of art and new forms of creativity that we didn't even think were possible are right around the corner.
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