You may have missed the retirement of MusicHype.com at the end of last week. It’s now official and complete.

Please see our blog post “Hello New Horizons” for more details about our decision.

If you have any questions please get in touch: support@appreciationengine.com

Thanks for all your support and happy March!

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2013 is starting off with new and exciting adventures for our team. Our new service, the Appreciation Engine, is taking off. 

If you visit the Appreciation Engine you’ll notice it looks a little familiar. The engine that sits underneath MusicHype.com has been split off to help businesses & brands create powerful customer profiles based on social activity. 

Unfortunately it’s also a bittersweet time for our team because on February 28th, 2013 MusicHype.com will be closing its doors.

We’re sad to say farewell to our beloved site and customers like you who’ve communicated, loved and rewarded your fans.…

Incentivizing fans to take specific steps & actions is a key part of any business, after all we all need to make money. Social media channels now give anyone the power to really dig in & see what their fans are doing, without creating unnecessary social spam.

We’ve worked with bands, labels & management companies over the past three years to run a whole range of campaigns. Based on our experience the most effective and least spammy way to interact with fans is through key social network messaging, and one of least effective can be a “task-based campaign.”

Mission or task-based campaigns usually sit on a stand alone page and show everything the fan needs to do to win the big prize.…

It’s such lovely news today, our sister site MusicHype.com is a finalist for the Innovator Awards 2012.

We’re privileged to be up against some very stiff competition in our category. Congratulations to Booktrack, Jumpshift & Smallworlds for being our fellow finalists.

Our core technology, the Appreciation Engine, was born & built in New Zealand, so we couldn’t be prouder of the recognition in our homeland.

Best of luck to everyone in the awards and way to go Kiwis!…

Endless Flowers has been out for a while now, but I’ve only just gotten around to listening to it in the last week or so. The main reason for my delay is that it isn’t streaming on Rdio in my country (New Zealand). It’s interesting how this factor really influences my listening habits these days – if it’s not available for streaming, I am a lot less likely to give it a spin. It seems so silly in 2012 that regional restrictions are still applied to a fully digital medium – why would you not want every possible person listening to your music?…

Just like the mighty Soviet navy we’ve launched new tech to help you focus on the fans that matter. We’ve called it a PING.

Each week we’ll notify you when a fan has been highly active

We send you an email showing who these fans are and how many points they’ve earnt over the last two weeks. You can use the links in the email to communicate directly with these fans.

Your fan message page filters to your very active fans & lets you communicate via Facebook, Twitter or Email

You use our page to tell your fans via email, Twitter or Facebook:

• thanks!

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It’s impossible to pin down any one album by the great Sam Cooke, and to be honest, the studio albums he released while he was alive did him little justice. His LPs tended to be collections of covers, usually of the showtune or big band variety, and rarely showcased his unique voice and superb songwriting. Nope, he was a singles man through and through, was Sam Cooke.

And boy, what singles they were.

From his first hit single, the beautiful “You Send Me” (consisting of little more than the same three word phrase repeated over and over – the second word swapped out for “thrill” in the second verse) right through the the sublime, posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come” (below), Cooke wrote some of the most powerful songs of his generation.…

I’ve gone through beta a number of times, with different companies. It’s always stressful getting ready to launch and figuring out how you’re going to manage & collect beta testers.

This year we discovered the beta system Prefinery. These guys have built a site that handles your beta submissions & management. Yes, we did high-five each other at the MusicHype office – we didn’t have to build our own beta management system on-top of our product.

Prefinery gives you all the customizable forms & emails you need to manage beta testers & invite.…

For the past 7 years, I have made music in the clouds/streaming subscription music services a personal mission. Early on, I was an “early adopter” to Rhapsody, a Real Networks company. Over the years, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to try them all (Rdio, Spotify, Deezer, GrooveShark, MOG, Rhapsody, Napster). Through this affinity and trial, I quickly discerned that this is the way of the future! Exhausting the fan with numerous hurdles to just hear music is futile and I’m super excited that the major labels have woken up to this world of frictionless music discovery and consumption.…

Our two big winners of the Fan Drive are Wellington & Archie.

They’ve both won a 6-month free plan on MusicHype, plus they get to give two of their lucky fans a year-long subscription to Rdio, Spotify or Deezer.

And don’t worry we’ll be having another fan drive later on this year.

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