Hype Machine experiments with music discovery, via email

If you want a more social or old-school way of discovering new music, you might want to skip sites like Pandora or Spotify.

They’re great, don’t get us wrong, but the big streaming sites try so hard to read your mind that sometimes they end up playing it a bit safe. They are really good at finding music that sounds like music you like.

Enter Hype Machine: a site that tracks what music bloggers are writing about in a bid to give civilians a way of finding songs that diehard listeners are totally feeling right now.

The bootstrapped Hype Machine has been quietly chugging along since well before anyone started taking the Brooklyn tech scene seriously. It launched in 2005.

The site’s basic function is to aid in music discovery by finding talked about tracks and then allowing users to favorite them. The Hype Machine team also does some curation, with lists like the annual Zeitgeist.

But now the site is getting in on the email game. This summer, Hype Machine kicked off Stack, a weekly newsletter featuring a playlist of songs handpicked by Hype Machine staffers.

Stack № 9 was released on Wednesday. This reporter is playing it as he types.

Hype Machine used to have a radio show, which abruptly ended last year. The old hypem.com/radio URL now redirects to the latest edition of Stack.

The company operates out of Williamsburg’s Secret Clubhouse, and lists six employees.