I’m curious to know how excatly the Hype Machine charts work. I noticed that Animal Collective is trending this morning, and that most of the blogged tracks are from MPP which has been around a while now. So why the new excitement?  A quick skim over my RSS reader reveals that they released a new video for Summertime Clothes.

So I guess a bunch of the music blogs aggregated by HypeM wrote about the video, but did enough of those bloggers also post the audio track to elevate AC to most-blogged artist this morning? I guess the question is: does HypeM count posts that mention an artist but do not include an audio track in their trending stats? Or do they only look at posts that include MP3 links?

Just curious.  It’s interesting to consider whether general buzz about an artist influences their standing on the HypeM charts even though the tallied posts won’t be included in the search results.