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TechBrunchTechBrunch

Spotify layoffs bring an end to music encyclopedia, leaving fans furious

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchFebruary 12, 20247 Mins Read
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brutal On a December day, we learned that 17% of Spotify's employees were laid off in the company's third round of layoffs last year. Shortly thereafter, music fans around the world discovered that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic treasure trove of music discovery, was no longer working.

These two events were not separate. His Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who founded EveryNoise, was one of his 1,500 employees fired that day, but his firing had far-reaching effects. Without access to his Spotify internal data, MacDonald can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which has become a vital resource for the most avid music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love.

“This project is about understanding the listening communities that exist around the world, what they're called, what kind of artists they have, what kind of audiences they have,” McDonald said. told TechCrunch. “The goal is to use mathematics as much as possible to find what's actually present in listening patterns. So I see it as an attempt to help global music self-organize.”

If you work for a major technology company and get fired, chances are that a customer of that company will write a nine-page complaint on a community forum complaining about how badly your former employer did you by firing you. You wouldn't expect it. Also, don't expect to see a flood of Reddit threads. Tweet I'm wondering how I can get the axe. However, this is how fans reacted when they heard McDonald's fate.

“I know that without Glenn we would have suffered a huge loss forever, but if Spotify doesn't do something to get back what they can, I'll gladly call it a piece of hot garbage.” I’m going to throw it away like a pile,” one fan wrote on the Spotify community. forum. “I'm looking forward to seeing Glenn and where he goes in the end. Maybe it'll be a service that actually cares about music and its super users (and its employees!).”

Another fan wrote, “Spotify doesn't have the problem of content decline that Netflix has. Everynoise was an honest and highly successful attempt to help willing people discover that music for themselves. Good luck.”

And to quote a more succinct complaint: “Everynoise was my Alexandria Library and you're burning it down from the inside out. Come on.”

McDonald created EveryNoise while working at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company that Spotify acquired in 2013. The site has over 6,000 music genre maps that you can click to hear samples of music in everything from pagan black metal to pagan black metal. Australian rockabilly. According to Samelweb data, EveryNoise's average monthly web visits in 2023 were approximately 633,227.

When he came across an unnamed genre, he usually tried to give it as descriptive a name as possible, such as Bulgarian trap or Italian post-punk.

“I've always thought that's part of the fun of talking about music in general: the common vocabulary we use when talking about music,” McDonald said.

But from time to time he took creative freedom. One of his favorite genre names is “escape room.” This appeared on many users' Spotify Wrapped after he added it in 2020, inspiring some memes.

“This was added in the process of trying to understand how people's listening is structured, and it's important to understand that this collective of artists that is Lizzo and everything around her can be viewed in all directions. I couldn't think of an easy-to-understand name, but it felt like an escape from the origins of trap music, and it was around the time when escape rooms were starting to get big, so I thought I'd call it “Escape.” Room,” he said. “People were complaining, 'What the hell is an escape room?' and then I found 'The Sound of Escape Room' on Spotify and thought, 'Oh, these are my favorite artists.' It was great to see.”

When Spotify acquired The Echo Nest, the data that McDonald's collected and hosted on EveryNoise became the basis of Spotify's genre system. McDonald's database powers the 'Fans Also Like' feature that appears on all artist pages. Additionally, Spotify's personalized “Daily Mix” feature grew out of a project McDonald's did with The Echo Nest.

“This genre project became Spotify’s genre system,” McDonald explained. “This is my visualization of a dataset that originally belonged to Echo Nest and now belongs to Spotify, where I worked as the primary curator and created all the algorithms and tools. I wasn't the only one working on the additions; many people over the years have contributed to building the data structures that power some of Spotify's features.”

Even if the features aren't directly tied to EveryNoise, the project's careful categorization of all genres means McDonald's traces can be found in dozens of Spotify features, including features that McDonald's hasn't actually worked on. It means that. Our in-depth and ever-expanding music genre map provides the data that informs products like our viral daily list and the Spotify Wrapped stats that fans share like crazy.

McDonald has contributed to numerous Spotify-wrapped features over the years, including features like Soundtown, Top Genres, Listening Personalities, and Tarot. Soundtowns, which indicates the geographic location closest to a user's musical tastes, was one of his most talked about articles on Wrapped this year.

“Sound Towns was specifically an idea that I had internally, and people picked it up and said we wanted to do it, and I helped the people working on that particular story. and made sure it was successful,” MacDonald told TechCrunch. “These are things we do because we love music and we want people to have these experiences.”

However, it was just days after Wrapped's arrival that Spotify made these staggering layoffs.

“People like me who were fired after working on 'Wrapped' were able to immerse themselves in work for about half the week. We created the most viral thing on the internet again,” McDonald said. he said. “The timing of the layoff and Wrapped was really sad. After I was laid off, I got a memento for my contribution to Wrapped.”

Perhaps the most popular feature on EveryNoise was its New Releases feature, which allows fans to easily browse new music filtered by genre. This may seem like it's on Spotify, but it's not.

“I've always turned to Everynoise not only to discover new genres, but also to find new releases in genres I've always been interested in,” a fan wrote on the same community forum. “Spotify is severely lacking in features that support natural user-guided discovery, so we used this site to fill in the gaps of Spotify.”

Spotify has an API for developers, but it's not as comprehensive as the internal data McDonald used as a Spotify employee. So while developers can retrieve individual releases through her API, there is no way to create a complete list of popular new releases or new releases by genre.

“The issue of new releases…it could come back if Spotify can do the little things that allow it to happen,” MacDonald said. “I still think it's kind of stupid that I can't work there anymore. I still care about the problem. And if I could use these public tools to solve the problem myself, I would. .”

If you go to EveryNoise now, the site may appear to be active. Scroll through and click on any of the 6,000 genres to play sample song clips via Spotify. You can also search for your favorite bands, see what genres they're linked to, and use those connections to explore undiscovered bands you've never come across before. However, this doesn't include the constant updates that EveryNoise fans continue to love, such as “New Music Friday” and seamless links to Spotify. For now, the site only offers a static snapshot of McDonald's final state before the layoffs, and many of its best features are no longer available.

“Everything I was working on was still running. Or I automated it and left it running when I got fired. But you never know what's going to happen. So some I think it’s going to get shut down,” McDonald said. . “If I'm lucky, it'll be shut down voluntarily and intentionally. If I'm unlucky, it'll be broken, and I'm not going to fix it.”





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