On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees discovered that they had been laid off within the firm’s third spherical of job cuts that yr. Not lengthy after, music followers world wide realized that the cult-favorite web site Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working.
These two occasions weren’t disconnected. Spotify information alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of many 1,500 workers who was let go that day, however his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn’t have entry to inner Spotify information, he can not preserve EveryNoise, which turned a pivotal useful resource for essentially the most obsessive music followers to trace new releases and be taught extra concerning the sounds they love.
“The project is to understand the communities of listening that exist in the world, figure out what they’re called, what artists are in them and what their audiences are,” McDonald advised TechCrunch. “The goal is to use math where you can to find real things that exist in listening patterns. So I think about it as trying to help global music self-organize.”
When you work at a giant tech firm and get laid off, you in all probability received’t anticipate the corporate’s clients to put in writing 9 pages of complaints on a community forum, telling your former employer how badly they tousled by laying you off. Nor would you anticipate an outpouring of Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you would probably get the axe. However that’s how followers reacted once they heard McDonald’s destiny.
“I know that without Glenn, we’ve suffered an enormous permanent loss, but if Spotify doesn’t do something to salvage what it can, I will gladly drop it like a pile of hot garbage,” one fan wrote on the Spotify group discussion board. “I’ll be keeping an eye on Glenn and where he ends up; likely, it’ll be a service that actually cares about music and its superusers (and its employees!).”
One other fan added, “Spotify does not have the Netflix problem of dwindling content. Spotify is sitting on an unfathomably large catalog of music and better metadata about that music than any organization on Earth has ever been able to amass, and Everynoise was an honest, and highly successful, attempt to make that music self-discoverable to those willing to put in the effort.”
And, to cite a extra concise complaint: “Everynoise was my Library of Alexandria, and you’re burning it down from the inside. Cut it out.”
McDonald created EveryNoise whereas working at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence agency, which Spotify acquired in 2013. The location hosts a map of over 6,000 music genres, which you’ll be able to click on on to listen to samples of music in any style from pagan black metallic to Australian rockabilly. In line with information from Similarweb, EveryNoise averaged about 633,227 month-to-month net visits in 2023.
When he got here throughout a style that didn’t have a reputation, he often tried to call it essentially the most simple factor doable – one thing like Bulgarian entice or Italian post-punk.
“I always thought that was part of what is interesting to talk about with music in general – the shared vocabulary we use to talk about music,” McDonald stated.
However often, he took some inventive liberty. Considered one of his favourite style names is ‘escape room,’ which fueled some memes when it appeared on a bunch of customers’ Spotify Wrapped after he added it in 2020.
“It was added in the process of trying to understand how people’s listening is organized, and I could see this cluster of artists that was Lizzo, and everything around Lizzo in all directions. I totally failed to think of any descriptive name for it, but it was kind of escaping from the origins of trap music, and it was about the time when escape rooms were starting to get big, so I was like, let’s call it ‘escape room,’” he stated. “It was great to see people complaining, like, ‘What the hell is escape room?’, and then finding ‘The Sound of Escape Room’ on Spotify and being like, ‘Oh, that’s all the artists I like.’”
When Spotify purchased The Echo Nest, the information McDonald collected and hosted on EveryNoise turned the premise of Spotify’s style system. McDonald’s database powers the “Fans also like” characteristic, which seems on each artist web page; plus, Spotify’s customized “Daily Mix” characteristic got here out of a undertaking McDonald made at The Echo Nest.
“The genre project went on to become Spotify’s genre system,” McDonald defined. “It’s my visualization of a dataset that was originally the Echo Nest’s, that is now Spotify’s, and that I worked on and was the main curator of, and wrote all the algorithms and tools for. I wasn’t the only person working on adding genres to it. A lot of people have contributed over the years to building that data structure that powers some things at Spotify.”
Even when a characteristic will not be straight tied to EveryNoise, the undertaking’s painstaking categorization of each single style signifies that McDonald’s fingerprints are on dozens of Spotify options, even these he didn’t truly work on. The meticulous and ever-expanding music style map offers the information that informs merchandise just like the viral Daylist, or lots of the statistics on Spotify Wrapped that followers share like wildfire.
McDonald contributed to numerous Spotify Wrapped options over time, like Soundtowns, high genres, listening personalities, and a Tarot-like characteristic. Soundtowns, which exhibits customers what geographic location most carefully shares their music style, was one of the viral tales on Wrapped this yr.
“Soundtowns was specifically an idea that I had internally, and people picked it up and said we want to do it, and I helped the guys that were doing that particular story to make sure it was successful,” McDonald advised TechCrunch. “These are things that we do because we like music, and we want people to have these experiences.”
However it was simply days after Wrapped got here out that Spotify made such staggering layoffs.
“The people like me who worked on Wrapped and then got laid off had like, half a week to bask in the work – we made the thing that is the most viral thing again on the internet,” McDonald stated. “The timing with the layoffs and Wrapped was just sad. I got my swag from having contributed to Wrapped after I was laid off.”
EveryNoise was maybe hottest for its New Releases characteristic, which allowed followers to simply browse new music filtered by style – which may look like one thing Spotify would have, nevertheless it doesn’t.
“I used Everynoise constantly, not only to discover new genres but find new releases in genres I had already cared about,” a fan wrote on the identical group discussion board. “Spotify severely lacks features which support natural and user-guided discovery and I used this site to help bridge Spotify’s failure.”
Spotify has an API for builders, nevertheless it’s not as complete as the inner information McDonald used as a Spotify worker. So whereas builders can pull particular person releases by way of the API, there’s no option to create an entire checklist of well-liked new releases, or new releases by style.
“The new releases thing… It could be revived if Spotify could do a little thing that would make it possible,” McDonald stated. “I still feel like it’s sort of silly that I don’t get to work there anymore. I still care about the problem. And if I could help fix it on my own with these public tools, I would do that.”
When you navigate to EveryNoise now, it might appear to be the positioning is lively. You’ll be able to scroll round and click on on any of the 6,000 genres, which play a clip of a pattern track through Spotify. And you’ll search your favourite band, see what genres they’re linked to, and use these connections to discover undiscovered bands you might by no means have encountered. However, this isn’t the always updating EveryNoise followers grew to like, with “New Music Fridays” and seamless hyperlinks to Spotify. For now, the positioning simply surfaces a static snapshot of its closing state earlier than McDonald’s layoff, with a lot of its finest options not operable.
“All of the stuff I worked on was still running – or, I left it automated and running when I was laid off – but I have no idea what will happen though, so I assume some of it will get shut down,” McDonald stated. “If we’re lucky, it’ll get voluntarily and intentionally shut down. If we’re unlucky, it’ll break, and I’m not there to fix it.”
