One of my favorite parts of the end of a year is seeing the end of year music wrap ups from various publications and bloggers I happen to read who cover music. Most of the time those lists are just the opinions of one person or a small group of people, which can be interesting, but my favorite list for 2007 was the Hype Machine’s Zeitgeist. They’ve recently launched their Zeitgeist for 2008.

The Hype Machine is a music site that crawls a large number of music blogs and aggregates what music is being linked to, discussed, and played often by its users. The Zeitgeist allows you to listen to the most 50 most popular artists, albums, and songs of the year. They’re releasing new blocks of it all week this week.

The Hype Machine is a great way to find new and rare music on specific artists you may already like and what music bloggers are saying about them, but it’s also a great way to find new music by going to the popular page. I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday and Fred Wilson picked up my quote for his post today that refers to the Hype Machine as the Rolling Stone of our time. Those are strong words, but I can tell you that I visit Hype Machine daily whenever I’m working on documents for work or just surfing the web, and I can’t remember the last time I picked up a Rolling Stone magazine or visited their site.

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