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 music that originated in Puerto Rico during the late 1990s. It rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s through a plethora of Puerto Rican musicians. Reggaeton has been influenced by Panama's Spanish reggae, and which rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s through a plethora of Puerto Rican musicians. It has been popularized and dominated by artists from Puerto Rico since the early 1990s.
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.
Reggae fusion is a fusion genre of reggae that mixes reggae and/or dancehall with other genres, such as pop, rock, hip-hop/rap, R&B, jazz, funk, soul, disco, electronic, and Latin music, amongst others.
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.
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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 Greek sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
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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.
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