On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees learned they had been laid off in the company’s third round of job cuts last year. Shortly after, music fans around the world discovered that the popular website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working.
There was a direct correlation between these two events. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, the creator of EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees let go that day. His layoff had far-reaching implications; without access to internal Spotify data, McDonald could no longer maintain EveryNoise, which was a crucial resource for music fans to track new releases and explore their favorite sounds.
McDonald’s vision for the project was to understand the global communities of music listening, identifying artists and their audiences. His goal was to use math to uncover real phenomena in listening patterns, essentially helping global music self-organize.
The layoff of someone like McDonald elicited an unexpected outpouring of anger and disappointment from fans of EveryNoise. They expressed their frustration and sadness over how the layoff would impact the future of the platform they loved. The loss of McDonald, coupled with the potential loss of EveryNoise, left many fans feeling abandoned by the company.
When Spotify acquired The Echo Nest, McDonald’s database and EveryNoise became the foundation of Spotify’s genre system. His meticulous and extensive music genre map fed various Spotify features, even those he didn’t directly work on. McDonald’s influence was felt across multiple aspects of Spotify, including the popular Spotify Wrapped feature.
However, the absence of McDonald’s expertise and the internal data he used as a Spotify employee created limitations on what developers could achieve with the Spotify API. The comprehensive and constantly updating EveryNoise, complete with features like “New Music Fridays,” became static after McDonald’s layoff.
Despite the setback, EveryNoise still offers a snapshot of its final state, allowing users to explore genres and discover new bands, albeit without the seamless integration with Spotify it once had.
McDonald remains hopeful that the site can be revived, explaining that he still cares about the problem and would do what he could to help fix it using public tools. However, the future of EveryNoise remains uncertain, leaving fans worried about the fate of a beloved platform.
