Music: How Spotify helps you discover the music trends of the future

It seems like an unusual profession, but for Glenn McDonald it is a reality, he is nothing more than responsible for creating new musical genres. However, he has in his hands the biggest music catalog in the industry, the Spotify, it is up to him the arduous task of mapping all the artistic expressions in the world and trying to make sense of them. If by chance you came across the expression japanese jazztronica, know that it is the fruit of your own imagination. It sounds complicated, and maybe it is. However, McDonald is nothing more than Spotify's data analyst, or, as he likes to call himself, data alchemist.

In a relaxed chat before a show in Boston, he can't help but smile when asked how important his work is. on the other, I try to produce musical experiences. In other words, what I try to do is make the numbers make sense, as well as the musical experience.”

To understand the extent of McDonald's work and how important it is to our personal experience on the platform, it is necessary to make it clear how it directly interferes with the pages of our favorite artists. “I do a series of weird projects on my own, looking for patterns and from that I create playlists. like the Every Noise At Once website,” explains McDonald.

The website he refers to, the Every Noise At Once, or, in free translation, All Sounds at Once, is a delight for all those who like to venture into the so-called “Minhoca Holes” of Music: it is an extensive map that catalogs exact (until the present moment) 1,742 genres and subgenres, from massive pop and country, as well as niche ones like Thai Hip Hop, German metal and discofox, a genre that is halfway between jazz and electronic, all this happening in the Nordic countries. For music lovers, McDonald's work is fascinating. For artists, it is a useful tool that enables a better understanding of their own place in the world of music, a context that can become an inexhaustible source of inspiration and contributions.

“The project was initially nothing more than a verification tool, which began to be developed at Every Noise At Once, when he was still at Echonest, a music industry data analysis company that was incorporated by Spotify in 2014”, he confesses. Mc Donald's,

Crossing genres against each other mechanically allowed McDonald to better understand how these styles have something in common with one another, and since then, this characteristic has been what has made his work stand out in the public eye. So much so that Every Noise at Once became a sweatshirt, just as it was elected the “most liked genre” by listeners of the You Year in Music. “Many people don't attach importance to what they're listening to at the moment. Relating that unique style to a group, a genre, means that it has a certain relevance, even if the name was something I came up with,” says McDonald.

The main page of Every Noise At Once is a large collage of words that seem random, but it is a large compilation of genres, which branch out, with the top part of the page dedicated to styles with backgrounds called “mechanical”, while the lower categories are the most “organic”, so to speak. At the top of the page is the re:techno, a subgenre of electro music. To find something like style vintage classic corner you will need to rotate the scroll bar a little more. From left to right, they divide the more serious genres into the more bouncy ones. By clicking on a genre of your choice, you are taken directly to a representative track on the platform itself.

Some genres have links to featured playlists and artists, which list songs that passionate users might also be interested in, and alternative playlists, which collect artists who haven't crossed a certain popularity threshold. There are also some playlists that compile the most popular 2017 songs by fans of a certain genre.

McDonald's constant work over the years has helped to identify and popularize even certain styles that were previously considered niche, such as the phenomenon of reggaeton, present in hits like Slowly e Havana. In addition, Every Noise at Once lists help to enhance features such as Daily mix and Discover Weekly, playlists tuned to users' music habits. Focused on the future, the next steps become to establish the demand for more genres to add to the platform.

Spotify also popularized the functional

McDonald identified that ambient music or audio is becoming popular and promptly tried to catalog them to improve the user experience. "O are it's the most obvious one, because there's been such a visible boom in harmonic noises and ocean sounds and things like that. But recently I have noticed that there is a growing popularity in songs for children's ballet lessons, versions simplified for children to dance. There is a surprising amount of music geared towards keeping your calm pets while you are away. I'm always looking for these pragmatic subcultures where people try to solve a problem with music, but not in an expressive way.”

A new world of possibilities

According to McDonald, there is a huge range of new musical possibilities in the world or that already existed and that only now that Spotify is knowing. “I'm fascinated by all this experimental electronic music being produced at Fruity Loops in Lisbon, which comes from Angola. The tools are simpler, the technology more accessible, and with this facility very interesting musical expressions were born. It is the cross-cultural crossing made possible for musicians who were once marginalized where the music industry is more restricted. This Lisbon scene is really interesting, because it's consumed in Europe, but it's produced on the South Atlantic coast of West Africa.”

unnamed genres

McDonald's scrutiny of the music found him finding patterns that were sometimes amusing and obscure. “Every culture has something guilty pleasure that they think no one else knows about, and they're all amazing. Bat in Germany, chalga in Bulgaria and Serbia and the Tecnobrega in Brazil. Apparently everywhere, there's terrible wedding music turned dance-pop. Every Noise at Once is not just a tool, very useful even for listeners; It's a chance to examine and rethink the ways music travels across cultures and between our ears."