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On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees discovered they had been laid off during the company’s third round of job cuts last year. Soon after, music fans around the world realized that the cult site Every sound at once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working.
These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of 1,500 employees who were laid off that day, but his dismissal had broader implications; Now that McDonald no longer has access to Spotify’s internal data, he can no longer manage EveryNoise, which has become an essential resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn about the sounds they ‘they like.
“The project is about understanding the listening communities that exist around the world, figuring out what they are called, which artists are a part of them, and who their audience is,” McDonald told TechCrunch. “The goal is to use mathematics as much as possible to find real elements that exist in listening patterns. So I see it as an attempt to help world music self-organize.
If you work at a large tech company and get laid off, you probably don’t expect the company’s customers to write nine pages of complaints on a piece of paper. Community Forum, telling your former employer what a mistake they made in firing you. Nor would you expect an outpouring of Reddit threads And tweets wondering how you could possibly get the axe. But that’s how fans reacted when they learned of McDonald’s fate.
“I know without Glenn we have suffered a huge permanent loss, but if Spotify doesn’t do something to salvage what it can, I will happily let it go like a pile of burning trash,” one fan wrote on Community Spotify. forum. “I’ll keep an eye on Glenn and where he ends up; it will likely be a service that actually cares about music and its superusers (and its employees!).
Another fan added: “Spotify doesn’t have Netflix’s problem of diminishing content. Spotify has an unfathomable catalog of music and better metadata about that music than any organization on Earth has ever been able to muster, and Everynoise was an honest and very successful attempt to make that music accessible to those who want it . make the effort.
And, to quote more concisely complaint: “Everynoise was my library of Alexandria, and you are burning it from the inside. Cut.”
McDonald created EveryNoise while working at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company, which Spotify acquired in 2013. The site hosts a map of more than 6,000 music genres, which you can click on to listen to music samples from everything from pagan black metal to Australian rockabilly. According to data from Similar websiteEveryNoise averaged approximately 633,227 monthly web visits in 2023.
When he came across a genre that didn’t have a name, he usually tried to give it as simple a name as possible – something like Bulgarian trap or Italian post-punk.
“I always thought that was part of what was interesting to talk about with music in general – the common vocabulary that we use to talk about music,” McDonald said.
But sometimes he took a certain creative liberty. One of his favorite genre names is “escape room”, which fueled some memes when it appeared on a user group Spotify wrapped after adding it in 2020.
“It was added to trying to understand how people listen, and I was able to see this group of artists that Lizzo was, and all around Lizzo in all directions. I absolutely couldn’t find a descriptive name for it, but it was sort of an escape from the origins of trap music, and this was around the time when escape rooms were starting to take off. the scale, so I thought, let’s call it “escape.” room,” he said. “It was great to see people complaining, like, ‘What’s an escape room?’ » then discover »The sound of the escape room‘ on Spotify and thinking, ‘Oh, these are all the artists I like.’
When Spotify purchased The Echo Nest, the data McDonald collected and hosted on EveryNoise became the basis of Spotify’s genre system. The McDonald’s database powers the “Fans Also Like” feature, which appears on every artist page; Additionally, Spotify’s custom “Daily Mix” feature originated from a project by McDonald at The Echo Nest.
“The genre project became Spotify’s genre system,” McDonald explained. “This is my visualization of a dataset that was originally Echo Nest’s, which is now Spotify’s, that I worked on and was the lead curator of, and for which I wrote all the algorithms and tools. I wasn’t the only one working on adding genres. Many people have contributed over the years to building this data structure that powers some of Spotify’s features.
Even if a feature isn’t directly related to EveryNoise, the project’s careful categorization of each genre means McDonald’s fingerprints are on dozens of Spotify features, even ones it didn’t actually work on. The meticulous, ever-expanding map of music genres provides the data that informs products like Viral List of daysor numerous statistics on Spotify Wrapped that fans are sharing like wildfire.
McDonald has contributed to a number of Spotify Wrapped features over the years, like Sound cities, top genres, in-tune personalities, and Tarot-like functionality. Soundtowns, which shows users which geographic area most shares their musical tastes, was one of the most viral stories on Wrapped this year.
“Soundtowns was specifically an idea I had internally, and people took it and said we wanted to do this, and I helped the guys who were working on that particular story to make sure it was successful ” McDonald told TechCrunch. “These are things we do because we love music and we want people to have these experiences.”
But it was only days after Wrapped’s release that Spotify made such staggering layoffs.
“People like me who worked on Wrapped and then got laid off had about half a week to immerse themselves in the work — we created the most viral thing on the Internet again,” McDonald said. “The timing of the layoffs and Wrapped was just sad. I got my comeuppance by contributing to Wrapped after I was laid off.
EveryNoise was perhaps most popular for its New Releases feature, which allowed fans to easily browse new music filtered by genre – this may seem like something Spotify would have, but it’s not.
“I used Everynoise constantly, not only to discover new genres, but also to find new releases in genres I was already interested in,” said one fan. wrote on the same community forum. “Spotify is seriously lacking in features that enable natural, user-driven discovery and I used this site to help make up for Spotify’s failure.”
Spotify has an API for developers, but it’s not as comprehensive as the internal data McDonald uses as a Spotify employee. So while developers can pull individual releases via the API, there is no way to create a comprehensive list of popular new releases or new releases by genre.
“The new releases thing… It could be revived if Spotify could do one little thing that would make that possible,” McDonald said. “I still feel like it’s a bit silly that I can’t work there anymore. I still worry about the problem. And if I could help solve this problem myself with these public tools, I would.
If you access EveryNoise now, it may appear that the site is active. You can scroll and click on any of the 6,000 genres, which play a snippet of a song sample through Spotify. And you can search for your favorite band, see what genres they’re related to, and use those connections to explore unknown bands you may have never encountered. But it’s not the constant update that EveryNoise fans have come to love, with “New Music Fridays” and seamless links to Spotify. For now, the site only presents a static snapshot of its final state before McDonald’s layoff, with many of its best features no longer usable.
“All the things I was working on were still running – or I left them automated and running when I got laid off – but I have no idea what’s going to happen, so I guess some of them will be closed,” McDonald said. . “If we’re lucky, it will be closed voluntarily and intentionally. If we’re unlucky, it’ll break and I’m not here to fix it.
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