8 ms·

Creator of everynoise.com laid off from Spotify

127 points by sr-latch 3y ago

KomoD 3y ago
> internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site Was he allowed to use that? I mean for this use case and publishing
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- not2b 3y ago
  Evidently he was allowed until he was no longer allowed.
blakesterz 3y ago
They also wrote a blog post on being laid off here: https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473 https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473
- fatherzine 3y ago
  "as long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn't need to care who they are." -- nailed it
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    I mean, I think this is by and large just true. If I am looking for a co-founder, who that person and their very unique combination of skills, perspectives, etc, matters a ton. If I am looking for SRE #20,000 for a FAANG, I need them to do the basic SRE role in a way that aligns with how we think about our caliber and culture. Obviously the person can do that in their own way to an extent, but we're not really looking for them to have insights like "actually, I don't think reliability matter - I am gonna stop doing it"
    - fatherzine 3y ago
      agreed! at small scale, we are persons engaged in meaningful relationships. at large scale, we are faceless cogs in the machine, numbers on a spreadsheet. being a faceless cog is dehumanizing, stripping our very identity away. how to reconcile the efficiencies brought by scale with the dehumanization it inflicts is a unique challenge for the technological society. I have yet to see a plausible answer.
    - hmcq6 3y ago
      I don't think that's necessarily what the author is trying to communicate. First of all, "If I am looking for a co-founder, who that person and their very unique combination of skills, perspectives, etc, matters a ton." Is that not just a well defined slot by another name? It sounds like your whole process is slots from conception to death. "Obviously the person can do that in their own way to an extent", can they? This feels like a platitude. I can't speak to the SRE roll but most places I've worked you might get to choose from a list of pre-written algorithms and a few small UX details. And when you talk about collaborating on larger problems most individuals don't usually even get a choice of code style. At a mature company I will agree that no, you shouldn't be hiring SRE's for product insight. Unless they fit into an insanely small bucket insight into your product is well outside of their scope. A contracting firm like McKinsey & Company would be a better fit for that kind of guidance. But tech insight? yes, you should be getting that from your SREs. Also your example "insight" just feels... bad faith. It's very possible I read into your comment to much and you were just saying "it is what it is". And I agree, it's just that I also think... https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/b097417f-9a28-4369-af3a-6739f1d36167 https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/b097417f-9a28-4369-af3a-6739f1d361...
  - pigeons 3y ago
    It's a really good post, "The secret truth of business advice is that it's mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there's really no method for making more of it."
    - fatherzine 3y ago
      there is the VC casino, which approximates a method. cruel and wasteful at personal level, but so far viable at scale.
  - yreg 3y ago
    That doesn't sound particularly efficient at utilizing the talent you hired.
- Yodel0914 3y ago
  That is an excellent article on the employee/company relationship.
- sirspacey 3y ago
  I actually disagree with the premise & ironically so did Henry Ford. Ford learned, as everyone does in manufacturing, that the “1,000 things” an intrinsically motivated, long term employee does are not interchangeable. It was Taylor (of Taylorism) who proposed companies should work this way. It has never been proven to work & often disproven. In every org, that I’ve personally seen the inside of, the concept of interchangeable talent has been an utter fiction. Even at franchises, one key employee is often the difference between success & disaster. However, our leadership class has both a social and educated POV that is articulated in this post. While I don’t disagree that a shareholder-return driven entity can never properly appreciate the value of individual team members, Henry Ford took the case all the way to the Supreme Court to fight against that. He lost. The preternatural rise of the entrepreneurial spirit - wherever it occurs - rarely devalues loyal, thoughtful team members. Those that do are sending up a flare gun that they are pushing to an exit with little concern for what happens after they cash out. Unfortunately we’ve hit the zenith where finance philosophies (which is what they are, not facts) have become so ubiquitous it’s career suicide to say otherwise. I’m so grateful founding is still a viable alternative path.
- andrewmcwatters 3y ago
  The end of the piece falls apart. You make more luck by creating and improving things people love and want to pay you for. Everyone does their job with love and belief until they get punched in the face with a pink slip.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  This is well-written, insightful, and heartfelt. I’ve lived both sides of this, but the dedicated people who led with their heart stay with me, even while the crushing logic of business reality kicks and renders their passion an aberration.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  This post feels taken straight out of my mind. I've never been good at being just another cog. My value as an engineer comes not from the things that I'm told to do, but from the things I choose to do because I think they're important or worthwhile. I've frustrated just about every manager I've had because of this. On the flip side, my spirit has allowed me to pursue paths others had dismissed. This has led to many situations where I've accomplished something that was thought to be impossible, or made significant improvements that compound and would not have been prioritized otherwise.
goatbrain 3y ago
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.
- notyourwork 3y ago
  I’ve noticed a small and hard to quantify degradation in recommender relevance over the last 12 months. To add, I think I’m seeing less discovery and more popularity bias. I used to discover a lot more.
- beanjuiceII 3y ago
  I have not noticed any difference
- thelandofrandom 3y ago
  [dead]
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  Not just that but the mobile app has changed from purely vertically scrolling categories (with horizontal selections of playlists/albums/music in the category) to song cards that try to preview a short clip of the song/video. It has to be some attempt to capture the "infinite scroll" of social media apps while pushing well-monetized tracks, but it's very frustrating for any attempt to actually, you know, listen to music.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Yea it's a mess. The heart conversion to plus recently was idiotic. Trying to combine the functionality of two distinct actions was not a smart idea. I also keep getting sponsored shit that I can't turn off even with a premium subscription.
primitivesuave 3y ago
This is unfortunate. My favorite feature of EveryNoise is the geographic categorization of music genres: - https://everynoise.com/cities.html https://everynoise.com/cities.html - https://everynoise.com/countries.html https://everynoise.com/countries.html 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. - https://everynoise.com/hyperspace_house_concerts.cgi https://everynoise.com/hyperspace_house_concerts.cgi
xyzelement 3y ago
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.
mckirk 3y ago
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'. 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. 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!
blah-yeah 3y ago
Bummer. EveryNoise is such a cool project! I pray it inspires other new, similar Music-Genealogy projects
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
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.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Are there any music download services showing numbers to support that assertion? I know that HN and the like talk about it a lot, but I feel like the public at large isn't trying to buy anything. They certainly aren't canceling a $15 Spotify account and turning around and spending $1000 to restore their playlists.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    Id assume the people switching to local ownership are just pirating, but i suppose that means there aren’t analytics to use.
  - amatecha 3y ago
    I basically did exactly that.. I canceled Spotify and pretty quickly bought tons of stuff. Check my "collection" at Bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/amatecha https://bandcamp.com/amatecha In a casual manner, I allot myself ~$15/mo (or more) to buy new stuff on Bandcamp. As you can see, it's going nicely and I have a ton of music from my favorite artists, also stored permanently on my NAS in mp3 and FLAC formats.
    - bdcravens 3y ago
      I'll step out on a limb and say that the kinds of consumers I'm talking about think that NAS is a rapper and think that FLAC is a short way of talking about the company with the talking duck. :-)
  - d357r0y3r 3y ago
    There aren't any numbers to support it. "I went back to torrenting" is a Reddit/HN thing. Regular people are still using streaming services for the vast majority of content.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related: Spotify’s astrology-like Daylists go viral, but the company’s micro-genre mastermind was let go last month https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/18/spotifys-astrology-like-daylists-go-viral-but-its-micro-genre-mastermind-was-let-go-last-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/18/spotifys-astrology-like-da...
lolive 3y ago
A long time ago, there was spotifynewmusic.com, which converted top albums from 40+ music curators [NME, among others] into comprehensive Spotify playlists. The website was maintained by jlarome. Who, i suspect, is a spotify employee. The website was abruptly abandonned, some years ago. And i have always wondered the reason why.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ofrzeta 3y ago
"I did my job with love and belief. This was always obviously risky. I had no illusions that the love was returned" That's a great insight. It will spare people a lot of frustration.

127 points by sr-latch 3y ago

> internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site Was he allowed to use that? I mean for this use case and publishing

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
not2b 3y ago
Evidently he was allowed until he was no longer allowed.

blakesterz 3y ago

They also wrote a blog post on being laid off here: https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473 https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473

fatherzine 3y ago
"as long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn't need to care who they are." -- nailed it
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I mean, I think this is by and large just true. If I am looking for a co-founder, who that person and their very unique combination of skills, perspectives, etc, matters a ton. If I am looking for SRE #20,000 for a FAANG, I need them to do the basic SRE role in a way that aligns with how we think about our caliber and culture. Obviously the person can do that in their own way to an extent, but we're not really looking for them to have insights like "actually, I don't think reliability matter - I am gonna stop doing it"
  - fatherzine 3y ago
    agreed! at small scale, we are persons engaged in meaningful relationships. at large scale, we are faceless cogs in the machine, numbers on a spreadsheet. being a faceless cog is dehumanizing, stripping our very identity away. how to reconcile the efficiencies brought by scale with the dehumanization it inflicts is a unique challenge for the technological society. I have yet to see a plausible answer.
  - hmcq6 3y ago
    I don't think that's necessarily what the author is trying to communicate. First of all, "If I am looking for a co-founder, who that person and their very unique combination of skills, perspectives, etc, matters a ton." Is that not just a well defined slot by another name? It sounds like your whole process is slots from conception to death. "Obviously the person can do that in their own way to an extent", can they? This feels like a platitude. I can't speak to the SRE roll but most places I've worked you might get to choose from a list of pre-written algorithms and a few small UX details. And when you talk about collaborating on larger problems most individuals don't usually even get a choice of code style. At a mature company I will agree that no, you shouldn't be hiring SRE's for product insight. Unless they fit into an insanely small bucket insight into your product is well outside of their scope. A contracting firm like McKinsey & Company would be a better fit for that kind of guidance. But tech insight? yes, you should be getting that from your SREs. Also your example "insight" just feels... bad faith. It's very possible I read into your comment to much and you were just saying "it is what it is". And I agree, it's just that I also think... https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/b097417f-9a28-4369-af3a-6739f1d36167 https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/b097417f-9a28-4369-af3a-6739f1d361...
- pigeons 3y ago
  It's a really good post, "The secret truth of business advice is that it's mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there's really no method for making more of it."
  - fatherzine 3y ago
    there is the VC casino, which approximates a method. cruel and wasteful at personal level, but so far viable at scale.
- yreg 3y ago
  That doesn't sound particularly efficient at utilizing the talent you hired.
Yodel0914 3y ago
That is an excellent article on the employee/company relationship.
sirspacey 3y ago
I actually disagree with the premise & ironically so did Henry Ford. Ford learned, as everyone does in manufacturing, that the “1,000 things” an intrinsically motivated, long term employee does are not interchangeable. It was Taylor (of Taylorism) who proposed companies should work this way. It has never been proven to work & often disproven. In every org, that I’ve personally seen the inside of, the concept of interchangeable talent has been an utter fiction. Even at franchises, one key employee is often the difference between success & disaster. However, our leadership class has both a social and educated POV that is articulated in this post. While I don’t disagree that a shareholder-return driven entity can never properly appreciate the value of individual team members, Henry Ford took the case all the way to the Supreme Court to fight against that. He lost. The preternatural rise of the entrepreneurial spirit - wherever it occurs - rarely devalues loyal, thoughtful team members. Those that do are sending up a flare gun that they are pushing to an exit with little concern for what happens after they cash out. Unfortunately we’ve hit the zenith where finance philosophies (which is what they are, not facts) have become so ubiquitous it’s career suicide to say otherwise. I’m so grateful founding is still a viable alternative path.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
The end of the piece falls apart. You make more luck by creating and improving things people love and want to pay you for. Everyone does their job with love and belief until they get punched in the face with a pink slip.
shermantanktop 3y ago
This is well-written, insightful, and heartfelt. I’ve lived both sides of this, but the dedicated people who led with their heart stay with me, even while the crushing logic of business reality kicks and renders their passion an aberration.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
This post feels taken straight out of my mind. I've never been good at being just another cog. My value as an engineer comes not from the things that I'm told to do, but from the things I choose to do because I think they're important or worthwhile. I've frustrated just about every manager I've had because of this. On the flip side, my spirit has allowed me to pursue paths others had dismissed. This has led to many situations where I've accomplished something that was thought to be impossible, or made significant improvements that compound and would not have been prioritized otherwise.

goatbrain 3y ago

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.

notyourwork 3y ago
I’ve noticed a small and hard to quantify degradation in recommender relevance over the last 12 months. To add, I think I’m seeing less discovery and more popularity bias. I used to discover a lot more.
beanjuiceII 3y ago
I have not noticed any difference
thelandofrandom 3y ago
[dead]
InitialLastName 3y ago
Not just that but the mobile app has changed from purely vertically scrolling categories (with horizontal selections of playlists/albums/music in the category) to song cards that try to preview a short clip of the song/video. It has to be some attempt to capture the "infinite scroll" of social media apps while pushing well-monetized tracks, but it's very frustrating for any attempt to actually, you know, listen to music.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Yea it's a mess. The heart conversion to plus recently was idiotic. Trying to combine the functionality of two distinct actions was not a smart idea. I also keep getting sponsored shit that I can't turn off even with a premium subscription.

primitivesuave 3y ago

This is unfortunate. My favorite feature of EveryNoise is the geographic categorization of music genres: - https://everynoise.com/cities.html https://everynoise.com/cities.html - https://everynoise.com/countries.html https://everynoise.com/countries.html 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. - https://everynoise.com/hyperspace_house_concerts.cgi https://everynoise.com/hyperspace_house_concerts.cgi

xyzelement 3y ago

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.

mckirk 3y ago

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'. 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. 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!

blah-yeah 3y ago

Bummer. EveryNoise is such a cool project! I pray it inspires other new, similar Music-Genealogy projects

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

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.

bdcravens 3y ago
Are there any music download services showing numbers to support that assertion? I know that HN and the like talk about it a lot, but I feel like the public at large isn't trying to buy anything. They certainly aren't canceling a $15 Spotify account and turning around and spending $1000 to restore their playlists.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
  Id assume the people switching to local ownership are just pirating, but i suppose that means there aren’t analytics to use.
- amatecha 3y ago
  I basically did exactly that.. I canceled Spotify and pretty quickly bought tons of stuff. Check my "collection" at Bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/amatecha https://bandcamp.com/amatecha In a casual manner, I allot myself ~$15/mo (or more) to buy new stuff on Bandcamp. As you can see, it's going nicely and I have a ton of music from my favorite artists, also stored permanently on my NAS in mp3 and FLAC formats.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    I'll step out on a limb and say that the kinds of consumers I'm talking about think that NAS is a rapper and think that FLAC is a short way of talking about the company with the talking duck. :-)
- d357r0y3r 3y ago
  There aren't any numbers to support it. "I went back to torrenting" is a Reddit/HN thing. Regular people are still using streaming services for the vast majority of content.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related: Spotify’s astrology-like Daylists go viral, but the company’s micro-genre mastermind was let go last month https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/18/spotifys-astrology-like-daylists-go-viral-but-its-micro-genre-mastermind-was-let-go-last-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/18/spotifys-astrology-like-da...

lolive 3y ago

A long time ago, there was spotifynewmusic.com, which converted top albums from 40+ music curators [NME, among others] into comprehensive Spotify playlists. The website was maintained by jlarome. Who, i suspect, is a spotify employee. The website was abruptly abandonned, some years ago. And i have always wondered the reason why.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ofrzeta 3y ago

"I did my job with love and belief. This was always obviously risky. I had no illusions that the love was returned" That's a great insight. It will spare people a lot of frustration.