Continue Everynoise

[victorvr]

everynoise.com is an invaluable exploration of Spotify genres, and the only place to see complete Friday releases with genre cross-references. Without it, much new music goes unheard.

The Spotify employee, glenn mcdonald, who maintained this was let go in recent round of layoffs.

Everynoise is no longer getting data feeds (beyond basic api) and New Releases may not happen.

Please make everynoise functions supported. I would prioritize New Releases.

[Ralek]

I used Everynoise constantly, not only to discover new genres but find new releases in genres I had already cared about. Spotify severely lacks features which support natural and user-guided discovery and I used this site to help bridge Spotify's failure. Implement these features natively in an open way, or at the very least re-support EveryNoise' efforts until you do. What a terribly disappointing decision on Spotify's part.

[awesomerdotcom]

Everynoise.com was incredibly useful as an electronic dance music and hip-hop DJ, to find new releases by genre. I found so many unsung artists and tracks with this method and evangelized it to all of my DJ peers. Unfortunately this feature cannot currently be reproduced via the external API, so I am commenting here to encourage its return. 🙏

[DuneyMole]

Without ENAO and The Sounds and etc, there is nothing to differentiate Spotify from any other service out there.

Honestly, it was only that site and its attendant tools (and the clear love and talent behind it) that kept me a Spotify superuser and fan and even proselytizer. Its music discovery features were the only things that kept me swallowing the bitter pills of (too many to list) infuriating changes and obvious downgrades to the app user experience that have been rolled out over the past few years.

I know that without Glenn, we've suffered an enormous permanent loss, but if Spotify doesn't do something to salvage what it can, I will gladly drop it like a pile of hot garbage. I'll be keeping an eye on Glenn and where he ends up; likely, it'll be a service that actually cares about music and its superusers (and its employees!).

[chrsilvi]

I cannot believe one person was managing this and now it's shutting down because they were fired. That person should have gotten huge raises and been put in charge, assuming there isn't something egregious they did. Everynoise is such a massive part of my Spotify experience, I wouldn't be able to find most of the music I listen to without it. 

[Rev-C]

Very disappointed that Glenn has been dropped, everynoise has been a key part of my spotify enjoyment and ability to find lesser known artists and fun things.

[pandusya]

This shut down ruined my life as a music editor! That was the best way to discover new music! Gonna pay, but guys, bring back new releases ny genre! 🐼🙌🏻 

[dbstraight]

Everynoise was the greatest tool ever created for people who prefer self-directed music discovery.

In almost any information discovery space, there are two fundamentally opposite approaches. The approach that tends to be popular today is to reduce to a single box: the Google / search / AI approach. But there is also another approach that favors exposing as much metadata as possible and providing complex ways of navigating that metadata. One possible example here might be newegg, where there are copious filters for every imaginable property of what you're searching for that you can filter on. Another might be Wikipedia's category templates that show up at the bottom of a lot of pages and put the page in different contexts.

Most streaming services completely ignore the second approach. Netflix flat out refuses to just give you a list of everything in their catalog with filters to slice and dice it your own way (probably because you'd realize how light their catalog is of anything but their own productions, but I digress), but others (JustWatch) have been able to fill the gap using accessible data.

Spotify does not have the Netflix problem of dwindling content. Spotify is sitting on an unfathomably large catalog of music and better metadata about that music than any organization on Earth has ever been able to amass, and Everynoise was an honest, and highly successful, attempt to make that music self-discoverable to those willing to put in the effort.

While I'm sure there are metrics that suggest that the slice-and-dice filterers and catalog-of-everything browsers are a small fraction of listeners, we drive the discoveries, playlists, radio stations, and trends of the future. Spotify can support its own future as the preeminent platform for music by supporting this community of hands-on, high-effort musical explorers.

Beyond the potential bottom-line impact, Spotify is the steward of the world's highest quality data on music. To lock up that data and make it only available to Spotify's own playlist creators and curators is to be a poor steward of that data. It is also fundamentally disrespectful to the music creators and taste makers whose listening history and curation created the data in the first place.

Spotify, do not squander your opportunity to leverage your treasure trove of data for the good of all music lovers of the world. Bring back, expand, and promote the creation of more sites like Everynoise. Provide the data to all the researchers and music nerds of the world and see what amazing things we can create.

Signed,

A huge fan and 12+ year continuous paid subscriber

[amore012]

In late 2016/early 2017 I gave a speech on my approximation for the most-one-hit-wonder. I poured through some playlists, calculated my best case and accounted for the many different versions of certain hand-waving dance songs to come up with a short answer of probably Deep Blue Something’s song Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And as I recall, I think, the audience kinda liked it, and I said well that’s this one thing I got.

As a young musician and developer I had so many burning questions that their database held answers to. Did Justin Timberlake actually succeed in bringing Sexy Back? Is by matter of simple plurality a song like Despacito actually enjoyed by people individually? Does DJ Kahled /actually/ hold the keys to success?

Then by procrastination-fueled chance, I came across a blog run by a developer and a music fan who was living (what I thought at that time) was my dream. To work at a big tech company, to gain access to the dev-privileged data would be to soothe the fire of insane nonsense that my fledgling code brain was convinced was just on the other side of a well-formed Python app and a few million (probably costly) API requests.

Over the years Everynoise gave me answers to questions I didn’t know I wanted to ask. It showed me many different ways to process music. For all my life I’ve performed music, sang, watched reviews, read blogs; I truly still found the site eye-opening.

On many occasions I would hoist my arms to 1’o’clock and 7’o’clock while earnestly describing to friends how density and organic feel could map sound. How clearly the anti-genre pattern explained metal as the opposite of children’s music. It tied King Gizzard to Slipknot to orchestral to blue grass. It charted the existence of donk, phonk, funk, ska and skunk.

What was neat was how the site never felt pretentious. It wasn’t a pissing contest about “oh, you mean you haven’t heard about Some Composite Made-Up Genre?”. It was simply a way to navigate a broad map of similarities. It was not just every, but any noise. All values impartially churned into a playground for the nerdy and noisy.

Would love nothing more than to keep this site alive. Please ❤️

[Mutantaxolotl]

Everynoise has been a gift to the world. It is not just a tool and a website but an archive. The destruction of Everynoise is akin---not necessarily to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but is akin to the knocking over of all the shelves and organization of the great library. Everynoise has been one of the only reasons that I have preferred to use Spotify over other platforms and it being gone leaves me with no reason to stay. 

[mtch77]

Dear Spotify

- I understand why you had to make layoffs

- But laying off Glenn was maybe the worst mistake you could have made

- Everynoise was the BEST Spotify interface that existed
- He unlocked music for the WHOLE WORLD in a way that no one else, and no other website could
- By firing Glenn, you are stating that you don't actually care about music. Because what he did for music as a whole was nothing short of revolutionary
- My ask: PLEASE re-hire Glenn to maintain everynoise. The Spotify community isn't the same without it