Spotify ended 2023 with some bad news. That's about 1,500 employee layoffs.
One of those employees was Glenn McDonald. He was in charge of one of the most extraordinary sites on the Internet, a site with an uncertain future. You may not know his name, but if you've used Spotify, you're probably familiar with his work.
Like a song recommendation algorithm in human form, McDonald's has built a career on extracting insights from vast amounts of music data.
So it makes perfect sense that he joined the Swedish streaming giant a dozen years ago and was hired as its “data alchemist.” This intentionally vague title meant that MacDonald was given the keys to his Spotify's vast listening data to perform all sorts of mathematical tricks.
“It's amazing what one person can do with modern technology and enough computers,” McDonald said in a recent Zoom interview from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Behind him is a wall of rare CDs that are unlikely to be found online. Nowadays, all songs can be accessed with a single click.
“I worked on fraud detection and artist similarity algorithms, as well as a ton of editing tools and internal metrics,” McDonald says of his work at Spotify. “Basically, anything you can do to extract insights from all this listening data.” And yes, much of his work is spent on Spotify Wrapped, the company's most meme-worthy data dump of the year. I was healed.
But MacDonald's most enduring trick was to name all the noises. That meant categorizing all the music we consumed into clear, meaningful (and sometimes strangely named) genres.
By the time he was fired on December 4, 2023, he and his team had categorized millions of songs from nearly 1 million artists into 6,291 named genres, from Aarhus indie to zydeco. .
It includes 56 types of reggae, 202 types of folk, and 230 types of hip-hop in some capacity.
They are all collected in Every Noise At Once. You can easily spend hours on this wonderfully minimalist website, peeling back the layers of auditory revelation one by one.
This is my favorite way to discover new and interesting music, music that isn't recommended on my personal Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. Covertronica, anyone? What about oddcore? If it wasn't for Every Noise, how would I have discovered Solfeggio Frequencies or the “I'm sorry apology song guy”?
(Sorry for asking you that.)
Glenn McDonald wearing an Every Noise at Once hoodie.
The joy of discovery here is not only in discovering songs you've never heard before, but in opening portals to entire styles of music and performance that you didn't know existed until a while ago. Some of these portals are micro-niches of artists and may not meet Spotify's new criteria for earning royalties. Some are very popular in different parts of the world or in completely different demographics.
In the world of Every Noise, genres are arranged in a long, scrolling word map, a color-coded, loosely spaced scatter plot. “The bottom is more organic, the top is more mechanical and electric. The bottom is more organic, and the top is more mechanical and electric.” The left is denser and more atmospheric, the right is more pointed. It has momentum. ”
Click on a genre name to hear a sample, or click on the chevron next to it, and you'll be taken to another world, another word map of artists that fill this particular genre.
Then click on the chevron next to an artist and you'll be taken to a page with complete details about that artist, all their tracks on Spotify, and all the other genres their music belongs to. Clicking on any of them will start a new discovery cycle.
Before you know it, you are being sucked into the multidimensional world of music.
Search for music by city, country, label, or gender. And Spotify has dedicated playlists for every category.
If you're feeling brave, dig into 106 Canadian genres, from Inuit pop to Quebecois chanson to Canadian stoner rock.
A true armchair mind trip has a Sound of Everything playlist that includes one sample track for each specified genre. That's more than 24 hours of music. There will be a lot of things you don't like, but there will also be new discoveries.
Oddly enough, genre names don't usually appear on Spotify itself. However, there are exceptions, for example, during Spotify Wrapped. This is an annual event where we all learn about the embarrassing tracks and genres we've been binge-listening to over the past year. We heard most of it.
This is where McDonald's shadow work sometimes finds itself in an unwanted spotlight. Confused listeners wondered how they could become such devoted fans of a genre they didn't even know existed. The most infamous is the so-called Escape His Room genre, which McDonald created in 2016. McDonald's has been haunted by the genre ever since.
“I was pretty bad at naming things,” McDonald admits.
About Escape Room, he says, “It's kind of a dance crossover of trap pop, Lizzo and everything around Lizzo when she first became popular. And all I could think of was the name. Just Escape. It was around the time when chamber music was starting to become popular, and there were trap elements in the music, but it was a kind of “escape from the trap.'' So I'm like, well, it's like an 'escape room.' ”
He looks back and says: “It wasn't about inventing names…but when you have this much listening data, you can sometimes see patterns that existed before they came up with their own names out there.”
Does he have a favorite?
“I think the best name I came up with was Permanent Wave, which was my name for what was New Wave when it was new, but it still sounds like new wave 30 or 40 years later. , some people still listen to it.”
Every Noise actually started out as an offshoot of Echo Nest, a platform that Spotify acquired along with McDonald's. (“Spotify was actually his sixth corporate acquisition for me,” he says.)
MacDonald was once a music writer, writing a review column “for 10 years before the word blog existed.” Even back then, he was interested in music data, eventually collaborating on the Village Voice's influential annual Puzz & Jop Music Critics Poll, but “back then, it was big data.'' ”.
He “collected the entirety of poll data and tried to analyze it to look for patterns” among the top 10 lists submitted by hundreds of music critics to determine the top albums of the year based on things like enthusiasm and hipness. Further ranked. This was a project he started on his own before Voice incorporated his findings.
He hasn't given up on writing, and his swan song on Spotify coincides with his upcoming book, You Still Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music.
This book promises to provide the pros as well as the cons of the streaming era, but there's no doubt that sites like Every Noise wouldn't exist without it.
After years of immersing himself in music, I wanted to know what it is that continues to surprise him.
“There are two or three chapters that answer that question,” McDonald says. “But what I discovered about the world was surprising to me.
“I mean, I'm a pretty educated person. I like to think of myself as someone who knows a lot about the world. But in the process of finding music, I find myself saying, 'Oh, I don't know much.' often noticed.
for example?
“Just as Turkish hip-hop evolved among migrant workers in Germany, (or) migrant workers from the Philippines in the United Arab Emirates where Christmas music began to be played on September 1st in the Middle East. . These are great stories to me!”
All noise lovers used to regularly check in on Fridays, when new releases were uploaded in droves to the word cloud. That is, until I broke the habit in December.
In January, McDonald's announced at the end of the page that the layoffs from Spotify (part of a 17% global workforce reduction that also included Nathan Wisniak, a prominent leader at Spotify's Canadian subsidiary) meant that he would be laid off. Added a small note explaining what it means. You no longer have privileged access to your data. All the noise will no longer be updated with new releases and more features may eventually be disabled. There is an ongoing petition on the Spotify Community page calling for the missing features to be reinstated.
There has been no official response so far, but a Spotify spokesperson said: billboard canada The current status of Every Noise is likely to continue for some time. This means there are no plans to restore access to restricted data, nor are there any changes planned to the Spotify API that would further restrict access to the site. The spokesperson added that the work MacDonald's team was doing continues even though he is no longer at the helm.
McDonald had two final questions.
What would Spotify lose without him?
“I think we're just starting to think about what we can do with all the possibilities of bringing the world's music together in one place. It's been fun to have the opportunity to make some progress in 12 years.” ..And it was longer than any job I had worked before. But I wasn't done yet.”
And what do we lose now that Every Noise is unplugged from Spotify's data spigot?
“In terms of practical impact, it hurts newer releases, but it tolerates older releases,” he concludes.
With nearly 6,200 named genres and the diversity of musical areas they cover, “there is more than you could explore in a lifetime.”