www.everynoise.com is a fantastic music tool, exploring genres via Spotify metadata mining, created by ex-Spotify employee Glenn McDonald. The sheer volume of sub-genres that everything is tagged with within Spotify, that Spotify users cannot see, is staggering. And Glenn was a genre taxonomist and alchemist there.
He was laid off in the early December rif.
His personal website has some good writing on how it all worked.
See his Twitter too, for updates on the archived version of everynoise, and post-Spotify thoughts, including a Jan 18 plea for a simple API change to be able to implement New Releases again. Yes, please.
His site was not within the Spotify firewall, and could be used by anyone, who could look up what they learned there on whatever streaming service they used, or walk into a record store and ask for stuff. If you clicked certain links at the end of trails you’d be pointed to Spotify though.
I primarily used the New Releases function every Friday (see bottom of everynoise home page for features, many of which are much greater than their small font stature implies). It was the musical highlight of my week. They 30second sampling of each new release, license permitting, was perfect.
There are many thousands of new releases every Friday, way more than Spotify’s Release Radar or New Indie Rock etc. playlists reveal.
New Releases on everynoise is not working now, as the general API available to the public doesn’t have the hooks.
I started an “idea” in the Spotify Community soon after the layoff, which now has over 580 votes and counting, and several pages of comments with some good writing about everynoise. Realistically Spotify probably won’t hire him again, but they could tweak the public API to re-enable much of it. Join us!
