Wednesday, Sep 30, 2026 at 11:08 PM

apparently Listed is shutting down at the end of the year, so this is one of the last posts in this format. i'll probably set up something to replace it though, i've been building out stuff to this end very slowly.

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one of the greatest loss to the music community in recent years is the firing of glenn mcdonald and the subsequent discontinuation of Every Noise at Once.

though among those who know it demands no explanation, i've got an example of the its delightfulness.

i stumbled upon a song that i liked but upon investigation turned out to be at least partially ai-generated. i won't mention it here but it was an interesting example of a subniche of electro swing. so i went to everynoise to look for some other exemplars of electro swing, perhaps something could be similar or interesting in a new way.

opening the page for electro swing (e/s for short), i was met with:

• one artist who i knew who squarely fit with e/s
• one artist who i listened to recently who i didn't consider to be in e/s, but upon reflection they sort of were
• one artist i hadn't listened to for years but who was absolutely representative of e/s
• a bunch of other artists, of which about four picqued my interest further

then i proceeded to go down to the neighbor map and antecedent map, and in each of those one of the sample genres was also a song/artist that i was deeply familiar with.

the delight here is in being on the edge of discovering something new right at the boundaries of what's already familiar. and in particular the antecedent map also containing something i like was a fun moment.

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besides the loss of everynoise, there's a deeper sadness i feel about loss of The Echo Nest's legacy. there were a couple of golden years where spotify capitalized on that acquisition and built one of the best recommendation engines for music that there was, and i bet in no small part due to the careful genre curation and data science of glenn.

on everynoise's frontpage it says that spotify has moved away from this microgenre system to a more generic ai-powered genre classification with less human input. this makes me mourn the scale to which spotify has grown – it's at the scale where a sensible business decision is almost at odds with any small-scale human values. sure, switching to a fully-ai-powered genre system is probably cheaper and more scalable, but it produces materially worse results; and sure, perhaps glenn wasn't targeted to be fired explicitly, but without him seems that nobody remains there who would vouch for the microgenre system; and sure, there's no point in maintaining The Echo Nest after acquisition because all of the value has been extracted and it's time to move forward.

i wish i knew how to prevent this or where to go from here. the world seems unequivocally worse than it used to be.