They also wrote a blog post on being laid off here:<p><a href="https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473" rel="nofollow">https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473</a>
This really bummed me out when I heard about it. I always thought Every Noise was a kind of 'magical' website in the sense of: I didn't understand how it could exist, as it seemed to be situated at a strange intersection of 'level of access to a huge corporation's data' and 'level of playfulness in using that data'.<p>After learning about the layoff and the role that the person behind it had at Spotify (namely that of 'crazy scientist', as far as I could tell), it suddenly made sense... but hearing that, even if you've impacted so many people's lives positively, you seemingly still can't escape the 'rules of the game' indefinitely also just made it all the more sad.<p>But still, I've found so many cool genres through Every Noise (my bachelor's thesis was largely written to The Sound of Neurofunk), and I've introduced so many people to the site... I'm really grateful it existed in the first place!
As an aside - but not completely, because it speaks to incidents such as this re Spotify... but have people been noticing a deterioration in the Spotify experience recently? For example, the UX of the app getting too complicated; the algorithms no longer have the "delightful serendipity" they used to, etc and so on. I suppose that is to be expected from any behemoth (especially one that is not particularly profitable and subject to the squeeze from other parts of the industry)... but the loss of the ecosphere that built around it seems to only hasten the problem.
This is unfortunate. My favorite feature of EveryNoise is the geographic categorization of music genres:<p>- <a href="https://everynoise.com/cities.html" rel="nofollow">https://everynoise.com/cities.html</a><p>- <a href="https://everynoise.com/countries.html" rel="nofollow">https://everynoise.com/countries.html</a><p>There are also features for "hyper local" discovery, i.e. finding the individual tracks that are most popular in your city. For music lovers, this site provides the initial breadcrumb for many fascinating rabbit holes.<p>- <a href="https://everynoise.com/hyperspace_house_concerts.cgi" rel="nofollow">https://everynoise.com/hyperspace_house_concerts.cgi</a>
Related:<p><i>Spotify’s astrology-like Daylists go viral, but the company’s micro-genre mastermind was let go last month</i><p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/18/spotifys-astrology-like-daylists-go-viral-but-its-micro-genre-mastermind-was-let-go-last-month/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/18/spotifys-astrology-like-da...</a>
The pendulum is already swinging back from subscriptions to ownership and on device apps. I hope this little foray of our industry into SaaS and renting software comes to an end soon.
A long time ago, there was spotifynewmusic.com, which converted top albums from 40+ music curators [NME, among others] into comprehensive Spotify playlists.<p>The website was maintained by jlarome. Who, i suspect, is a spotify employee.<p>The website was abruptly abandonned, some years ago. And i have always wondered the reason why.
> internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site<p>Was he allowed to use that? I mean for this use case and publishing
Never heard of every noise but I enjoyed his blogpost linked lower down. His name is Glenn McDonald and he's a (former) "Data Alchemist" at Spotify according to LinkedIn.
"I did my job with love and belief. This was always obviously risky. I had no illusions that the love was returned"<p>That's a great insight. It will spare people a lot of frustration.