In a brutal On a December day, 17% of Spotify workers found out they had been laid off in the company’s third round of job cuts last year. Soon after, music lovers around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every noise at once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic music discovery goldmine, had gone out of business.
These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of 1,500 employees laid off that day, but his layoff had wider implications. Now that McDonald doesn’t have access to Spotify’s internal data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which has become a go-to resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love.
“The project is to understand the listening communities that exist in the world, understand what they’re called, who the artists are in them, and who their audience is,” McDonald told TechCrunch. “The goal is to use math wherever you can to find real things that are in the listening patterns. So I see it as an attempt to help world music organize itself.”
If you work for a big tech company and get fired, you probably don’t expect the company’s customers to write nine pages of complaints in one community forum, telling your former employer how badly they messed up with the layoff. You wouldn’t expect an explosion either Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you could get the axe. But this is how fans reacted when they heard the fate of McDonald’s.
“I know without Glenn, we’ve suffered a huge permanent loss, but if Spotify doesn’t do something to save what they can, I’ll gladly throw it away like a pile of hot garbage,” wrote one fan on the Spotify community. court. “I’ll be watching Glenn and where he ends up. most likely, it will be a service that really cares about music and its superusers (and employees!).”
Another fan added: “Spotify doesn’t have Netflix’s problem of reducing content. Spotify sits on an incredibly large catalog of music and better metadata about that music than any organization on Earth could ever muster, and Everynoise was an honest and wildly successful attempt to make that music self-discoverable to those who they want you to make an effort.”
And, to quote a more concise one complaint: “Everynoise was my Library of Alexandria and you are burning it from the inside. Cut it out.”
McDonald created EveryNoise while working at The Echo Nest, a music information company, which was acquired by Spotify in 2013. The site hosts a map of more than 6,000 genres of music that you can click on to listen to music samples in any genre, from pagan black metal to Australian rockabilly. According to data from Similar WebEveryNoise averaged about 633,227 monthly web visits in 2023.
When he encountered a genre that didn’t have a name, he usually tried to name it as simply as possible – something like Bulgarian trap or Italian post-punk.
“I always thought that was part of what’s interesting about talking about music in general — the common vocabulary we use to talk about music,” McDonald said.
But occasionally, he took some creative liberties. One of his favorite names is “Escape room”, which fed some memes when it appeared on a bunch of Spotify Wrapped users after adding it in 2020.
“It added to the process of trying to understand how people’s listening is organized, and I could see this complex of artists that Lizzo was, and everything around Lizzo in all directions. I couldn’t think of a descriptive name for it, but it was kind of escaping from the early days of trap music and it was around the time when escape rooms were starting to get big, so I was like, let’s call it ‘escape’. room,” he said. “It was great to see people complaining, like, ‘What the hell is an escape room?’ and then finding “The Sound of Escape Roomon Spotify and go, “Oh, these are all the artists I like.”
When Spotify bought The Echo Nest, the data McDonald collected and hosted on EveryNoise became the basis of Spotify’s genre system. McDonald’s database powers the “Fans Also Like” feature, which appears on every artist page. Additionally, Spotify’s personalized “Daily Mix” feature grew out of a project McDonald did at The Echo Nest.
“The genre project went on to become Spotify’s genre system,” explained McDonald. “It’s my visualization of a dataset that was originally Echo Nest’s, which is now Spotify’s, and which I worked on and was the main curator of and wrote all the algorithms and tools for. I wasn’t the only person working to add items to it. Many people have contributed over the years to the creation of this data structure that powers certain things in Spotify.”
Even if a feature isn’t directly connected to EveryNoise, the project’s painstaking categorization of each individual genre means McDonald’s fingerprints are on dozens of Spotify features, even ones he didn’t actually work on. The meticulous and ever-expanding map of the music genre provides the data that informs products like the viral Daylist or many of the stats on Spotify Wrapped that fans share at lightning speed.
McDonald has contributed to a number of Spotify Wrapped features over the years, including Soundtowns, top genres, listening personalities and a Tarot-like feature. Soundtowns, which shows users which geographic location most shares their musical taste, was one of the most viral stories on Wrapped this year.
“Soundtowns was specifically an idea that I had internally, and people took it and said we want to do it, and I helped the guys who did that story 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 just days after Wrapped’s release that Spotify made such shocking layoffs.
“People like me who worked on Wrapped and then got fired had about half a week to do their jobs — we made what’s the most viral thing on the internet again,” McDonald said. “The timing with the layoffs and Wrapped was just sad. I got a kick out of contributing to Wrapped after the layoff.”
EveryNoise was perhaps most popular for its New Releases feature, which allowed fans to easily browse new music filtered by genre — which might seem like something Spotify would have, but it doesn’t.
“I used Everynoise all the time, not only to discover new genres, but also to find new releases in genres I was already interested in,” one fan He wrote in the same community forum. “Spotify seriously lacks features that support natural and user-driven discovery, and I used this site to help bridge Spotify’s failure.”
Spotify has an API for developers, but it’s not as comprehensive as the internal data that McDonald used as a Spotify employee. So while developers can pull individual releases through the API, there’s no way to create a complete list of popular new releases or new releases by genre.
“The thing about new releases … It could be revived if Spotify could do something that would make it possible,” McDonald said. “I still feel like it’s kind of silly that I don’t get to work there anymore. I am still interested in the problem. And if I could help fix it myself with these public tools, I would.”
If you navigate to EveryNoise now, it may appear that the site is live. You can scroll and click on any of the 6,000 genres, which play a clip of a sample song through Spotify. And you can search for your favorite band, see what genres they’re associated with, and use those connections to explore unknown bands you might never have come across. But that’s not what EverNoise fans have come to love, with its “New Music Fridays” and seamless Spotify links. For now, the site just shows a static snapshot of its final state before McDonald’s layoff, with many of its best features no longer functional.
“All the things I worked 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 are going to shut down,” McDonald said. . “If we’re lucky, it will be closed voluntarily and on purpose. If we’re unlucky, it’s going to break and I’m not there to fix it.”
