Type of site | Music genre database |
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Owner |
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Founder(s) | Glenn McDonald |
URL | https://everynoise.com/ |
Launched | May 2013 |
Every Noise at Once is a music discovery website created by former Spotify employee Glenn McDonald. It operates as a directory of musical genres, artists, and tracks listed by Spotify, in a scatter plot word map style. In December 2023, McDonald stopped updating the site with new data after he was laid off from Spotify.
The website operates as a directory which maps and tracks the algorithmically generated musical genres listed on Spotify, [1] [2] which are usually not visible on the Spotify app itself aside from its yearly Spotify Wrapped event. These genres are arranged on a long word map in a colour coded scatter plot structure such that songs lower down are more "organic" and up is more "mechanical and electric", whereas left is "denser and more atmospheric" and right is "spikier and bouncier". [2] Users can click on the name of a genre to hear a 30-second sample of a song, [3] click on chevrons next to any genre name to display another word map of artists corresponding to that genre, and click on the chevrons next to an artist's name to view their tracks as well as a list the genres that their music fits within. [2] [4]
Each genre is given its own dedicated Spotify playlist. [2] The site also provides information on popular songs and new releases for each genre, [1] and allows exploration by city, by country, by label or by gender. [2]
Genres listed on the website, and thus in Spotify's list of genres, include shoegaze, freak folk, doomcore, Viking metal, [4] escape room, happy hardcore, [5] goregrind, sky room, grungegaze, dungeon synth, filthstep, deep filthstep, [6] brostep, liquid funk, neo-pagan and didgeridoo music. [7] It also covers genres from specific nations including German show tunes, [4] Polish reggae, [5] Russian drain, [6] Greek hip hop, Estonian pop, German oi! and Finnish jazz. [7]
McDonald created Every Noise at Once when he was working at music intelligence firm The Echo Nest. This company had been acquired by Spotify in 2013, and the genre mapping data created by McDonald was built into various Spotify features, including its "Daily Mix" and "Fans also like" recommendation functions. [1] He added a list mode for genres in May 2014. [7]
By December 2020, the site hosted 5,071 genre distinctions, [5] and by October 2021 it hosted 5,602. [6]
On December 4, 2023, [2] McDonald was one of the 1,500 employees laid off by Spotify. As a result, he lost access to the data needed to maintain and update the website's database; it was no longer updated with new music from this point, and he lost the ability to fix any errors caused by changes on Spotify's end. [1] At this point, he and his team had categorized tracks from about one million artists into 6,291 named genres, including 56 kinds of reggae, 202 kinds of folk and 230 kinds of hip hop. A spokesperson for Spotify stated that the current status of Every Noise was likely to remain for the foreseeable future. [2]
Following McDonald's being laid off in December 2023, Jess Weatherbed of The Verge stated that Every Noise at Once provided "simplicity" to its users, "a set of basic discovery features that allowed people to explore new genres and browse new music within those genres without filtering through a deluge of algorithmic recommendations. It’s a native utility that Spotify is noticeably lacking, despite having the data readily available to implement it if the company wished to do so." She stated that it was "truly one of the best things about Spotify, despite never being an official part of the service." [1] Billboard Canada described it as "one of the most extraordinary sites on the internet" and "gloriously minimalist". [2]
Reggaeton is a modern style of popular and electronic music that originated in Panama during the late 1980s, and which rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s through a plethora of Puerto Rican musicians. It has evolved from dancehall, with elements of hip hop, Latin American, and Caribbean music. Vocals include toasting/rapping and singing, typically in Spanish.
The Billboard charts tabulate the relative weekly popularity of songs and albums in the United States and elsewhere. The results are published in Billboard magazine. Billboard biz, the online extension of the Billboard charts, provides additional weekly charts, as well as year-end charts. The two most important charts are the Billboard Hot 100 for songs and Billboard 200 for albums, and other charts may be dedicated to a specific genre such as R&B, country, or rock, or they may cover all genres. The charts can be ranked according to sales, streams, or airplay, and for main song charts such as the Hot 100 song chart, all three data are used to compile the charts. For the Billboard 200 album chart, streams and track sales are included in addition to album sales.
Chill-out is a loosely defined form of popular music characterized by slow tempos and relaxed moods. The definition of "chill-out music" has evolved throughout the decades, and generally refers to anything that might be identified as a modern type of easy listening.
Lo-fi is a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate stylistic choice. The standards of sound quality (fidelity) and music production have evolved over the decades, meaning that some older examples of lo-fi may not have been originally recognized as such. Lo-fi began to be recognized as a style of popular music in the 1990s, when it became alternately referred to as DIY music. Some subsets of lo-fi music have become popular for their perceived nostalgic and/or relaxing qualities, which originate from the imperfections that define the genre.
A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. Genre is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style, although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. As of September 2024, it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services, with over 640 million monthly active users comprising 252 million paying subscribers. Spotify is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts.
Chillwave is a music microgenre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by evoking the popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s while engaging with notions of memory and nostalgia. Common features include a faded or dreamy retro pop sound, escapist lyrics, psychedelic or lo-fi aesthetics, mellow vocals, slow-to-moderate tempos, effects processing, and vintage synthesizers.
The Echo Nest is a music intelligence and data platform for developers and media companies. Owned by Spotify since 2014, the company is based in Somerville, MA. The Echo Nest began as a research spin-off from the MIT Media Lab to understand the audio and textual content of recorded music. Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation, audio fingerprinting, and analysis for consumers and developers.
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and a subgenre of hauntology, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s, and became well-known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, 1970s elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
The Billboard Twitter Real-Time charts were four interactive Billboard music magazine charts debuted on May 27, 2014. The charts ranked trending songs from popular and emerging artists based on how often they are mentioned in messages called "tweets" sent by social networking site Twitter in the United States. The charts "Trending 140", "Emerging Artists", "Weekly Top Tracks" and "Weekly Emerging Artists" were reported to define how fans interacted with, and influenced, popular content by ranking the most popular songs being shared on Twitter in the U.S. The first two charts updated on a "real-time" minute-by-minute basis, with the last two charts providing weekly summaries.
Tidal is a Norwegian-American music streaming service, launched in 2014 by the Norwegian-Swedish public company Aspiro. Tidal is now majority-owned by Block, Inc., the owner of the point-of-sale system Square.
A microgenre is a specialized or niche genre. The term has been used since at least the 1970s to describe highly specific subgenres of music, literature, film, and art. In music, examples include the myriad sub-subgenres of heavy metal and electronic music. Some genres are sometimes retroactively created by record dealers and collectors as a way to increase the monetary value of certain records, with early examples including Northern soul, freakbeat, garage punk, and sunshine pop. By the early 2010s, most microgenres were linked and defined through various outlets on the Internet, usually as part of generating popularity and hype for a newly perceived trend. Examples of these include chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, and vaporwave.
Lofi hip hop is a form of downtempo, lo-fi music that combines hip hop beats with elements of chill-out. The name refers to the unpolished, low fidelity production techniques common in the style. It was popularized in the 2010s on YouTube.
Riddim is a subgenre of dubstep known for its heavy use of repetitive and minimalist sub-bass and triplet percussion arrangements. It shares the same name as the Jamaican genre that influenced both it and dubstep, which originally derived from dub, reggae, and dancehall. Originating in the United Kingdom, specifically Croydon, in the early 2010s as a resurgence of the style used by early dubstep works, riddim started to gain mainstream presence in the electronic music scene around 2015.
Urbano music or Latin urban is a transnational umbrella category including many different genres and styles. As an umbrella term it includes a wide and diverse set of genres and styles such as dancehall, dembow, urban champeta, funk carioca, Latin hip hop and reggaeton. The commercial breakthrough of this music took place in 2017 with artists from Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Puerto Rico, the United States, Venezuela and even non-Spanish-speaking nations, such as Brazil, where Portuguese is spoken.
Dancehall pop is a sub-genre of the Jamaican genre dancehall that originated in the early 2000s. Developing from the sounds of reggae, dancehall pop is characteristically different in its fusion with western pop music and digital music production. Dancehall pop is also different from dancehall in that most songs use lesser Jamaican Patois in lyrics––allowing it to be globally understood and consumed. It also incorporates the key pop music elements of having melodies, hooks, and the verse-chorus format. Additionally, the genre moves away from the reggae and roots reggae music origins in social and political protest, now lyrically centering on partying, dancing, and sexuality.
Hyperpop is a loosely defined electronic music movement and microgenre that predominantly originated in the United Kingdom during the early 2010s. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on popular music, and typically integrates pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on elements commonly found in electronic, hip hop, and dance music.
Spotify Wrapped is a viral marketing campaign by Spotify released annually since 2016 between November 30 and December 6, allowing users to view a compilation of data about their activity on the platform over the preceding year, and inviting them to share a colorful pictorial representation of it on social media.
Glenn McDonald is a former employee of Spotify who was responsible for grouping and naming genres at the company. Often described by media as a "data alchemist", he created the music discovery website Every Noise at Once, and is in part responsible for the naming of the hyperpop musical movement.