Glenn Mcdonald is a former employee of

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a List of companies of Sweden, Swedish Music streaming service, audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. , it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services ...

who was responsible for grouping and naming genres at the company. Often described by media as a "data

alchemist Alchemy (from the Arabic word , ) is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first ...

", he created the music discovery website Every Noise at Once, and is in part responsible for the naming of the

hyperpop Hyperpop (sometimes called bubblegum bass) is a loosely defined electronic music movement and microgenre that predominantly originated during the early 2010s in the United Kingdom. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on p ...

musical movement.

Life and education

Mcdonald graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in visual and environmental studies.

Career

Mcdonald worked for a time at the music intelligence firm

The Echo Nest 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 ...

. This company was 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. He created the Every Noise at Once website that year. Under Spotify, he continued to work as part of a team to categorize tracks from about one million artists into 6,291 named genres, including 56 kinds of

reggae Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica during the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its Jamaican diaspora, diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first ...

, 202 kinds of

folk Folk or Folks may refer to: Sociology *Nation *People * Folklore ** Folk art ** Folk dance ** Folk hero ** Folk horror ** Folk music *** Folk metal *** Folk punk *** Folk rock ** Folk religion * Folk taxonomy Arts, entertainment, and media * Fo ...

and 230 kinds of hip hop. He developed an

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

for the company which evaluated music based on what he called "subjective psychoacoustic attributes", including "tempo," "duration," "color," "modernity," and "femininity." He then named what he called "emerging genres" himself, including the Spotify genre Escape Room, so named because of its sonic connection to

trap music Trap music, also known simply as trap, is a subgenre of hip-hop music which originated in the Southern United States, with lyrical references to trap starting in 1991 but the modern sound of trap appearing in 1999. The genre gets its name from t ...

. In 2018, Mcdonald input the genre name "

" into this metadata, which was later used to name Spotify's hyperpop playlist and thus the musical movement itself. On December 4, 2023, Mcdonald was one of the 1,500 employees, or 17% of its workforce,

laid off A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization ...

by Spotify. As a result, he lost access to the data needed to maintain and update his website's database, as well as the ability to fix any errors caused by possible changes on Spotify's end. A spokesperson for Spotify stated that the current status of Every Noise was likely to remain for the foreseeable future. In 2024, Mcdonald's book ''You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song'', about the increasing reliance of the

music industry The music industry are individuals and organizations that earn money by Songwriter, writing songs and musical compositions, creating and selling Sound recording and reproduction, recorded music and sheet music, presenting live music, concerts, ...

upon

streaming Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downl ...

, was published. In the book, he describes Spotify as "

surveillance capitalism Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutuall ...

" that makes use of name, age, gender, location and existing tastes, but is limited in its knowledge. Upon the release of the 2024 edition of Spotify Wrapped, he criticised its rollout, stating that "the goal of Wrapped, in particular, is brand virality," and that "there’s not much in the way this year of data storytelling."

References

{{Reflist Living people Data engineers Spotify people Year of birth missing (living people) Harvard College alumni