Spotify’s Popular Music Discovery Project Is In Limbo After Its Chief Architect Gets Laid Off

Photo Credit: EveryNoise.com

In December 2023, Spotify made further cuts to its staff, laying off 17% of its workforce in the third round of job cuts for the year. The data engineer responsible for the music discovery website ‘Every Noise at Once’ was included in those cuts.Now the website has pretty much stopped working and engineer Glenn McDonald says there’s not much he can do about it. Without access to internal Spotify data, he is no longer able to maintain the website—which tracks obscure music track releases based on a giant cloud web.

“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 said in a comment to TechCrunch about the website. “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.”

Spotify fans are massively upset about EveryNoise.com no longer working, even taking to the Spotify Community forums to voice their unhappiness. “[The site] is an invaluable exploration of Spotify genres, and the only place to see complete Friday releases with genre cross-references,” writes the thread starter. “Without it, much new music goes unheard.” 831 people have agreed with the original poster so far, helping the request reach ‘Good Suggestion’ status on the Community forums.

“EveryNoise was at the heart of the love of music I’ve developed over the last two years,” writes another commenter. “The ability to explore a true map of music with the detail of McDonald’s site gave me a great aprpeciation of so many different types of music and got me hooked on everything from Brazilian post-rock to Souldies to Bubblegrunge. Over 90% of my favorite artists that I’ve started following these last two years have come from this site’s tools, whether through an updated map or new releases.”Glenn McDonald created the site while working for The Echo Nest, a music intelligence firm. Spotify acquired that firm in 2013 and it has been trucking along in Glenn’s care until 2023. EveryNoise.com features a map of over 6,000 music genres, allowing users to discover a wide array of music that will never be in the mainstream. It’s a nice site for true music fanatics, but it garnered around 633,000 monthly visits in 2023 according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb.

McDonald’s creation at The Echo Nest became the basis for Spotify’s wide-ranging genre system and the ‘Fans Also Like’ recommendation algorithm that appears on every single Spotify artist page.