If I'm reading this right: I think building an external service in a personal capacity on top of an internal company API/data that you only have access to because you're an employee, it was always living on borrowed time. Frankly I'm surprised it lived long enough to build a following.
He built the site at a company that was acquired by Spotify, and which became their modern recommendation system. There must have been some sort of agreement to keep it going, IMO the real story is about the people that made what makes Spotify good being laid off.
Companies building a gajillion different niche app/features may have just been a side effect of low interest rates and venture capital money flowing like crazy. In practice a profitable, stable businesses does not have to the capacity to both build and maintain software outside of its core competencies.
Part of the reason headcounts exploded is due to companies building more functionality in-house. Features, even after they’re built, aren’t free. It’s not just infrastructure costs it’s mostly labor costs to maintain all that functionality even if it’s to just “keep the lights on”
The article mentions that the project has over 600K monthly users, which is a significant number for a side project. However, in comparison to Spotify's user base of 1000 times more, it now seems insignificant. This reminds me of how companies like Google only consider services with hundreds of millions users to be successful or important. It appears that Spotify is in a similar position now. My only hope is that the API does not degrade significantly.
Which is how you end up in silly situations where Google or equivalent breaks, cuts or ignores some bug that affects millions of people with "it's just a rounding error". At some point, one must recognize its still millions and they remember that treatment.
602m monthly active users as of Q4 2023. That's in their investor deck and similar figures in their SEC reports. Around 250m premium subscribers, the rest on the free tier, accessing Spotify at least once per month.
I've created 4 free accounts over the years but haven't spent a minute listening. I'm sure it's like facebook, once an account is created it's counted as a unique user forever.
That’s ok, but they confirmed they have around 250mil paid subscribers. I can easily imagine 350-400mil free ones on top of that, especially since they explicitly say they only count active users, not just the number of user accounts.
Well, they'd need to cite something that shows that every Spotify member shares their membership with 1.6 other people. I'm skeptical of that. It's bad enough with Netflix recommendations and profiles - Spotify doesn't support profiles, so you're sharing your music choices with those people? Spotify is also pretty aggressive with account sharing.
More likely free users with their own accounts. Subscribed users are a subset of all users and I wouldn’t be surprised if unsubscribed users were the larger group.
Companies operating in some countries are required in certain circumstances (forced layoffs), to consider the social aspect of who they make redundant.
So people that have children, or are disabled, or older, or anyone who may have difficultly finding a job and losing their job would bring hardship (especially to vulnerable dependents of the employee) are required legally to grade each employee on a social risk scale and make those who are most mobile and independent redundant as a priority.
As you might guess, companies therefore try to avoid such programs in favor of voluntary redundancy, in the hope that such employees will take the payout.
These kind of programs (when enforced) tend to push out the young, driven, hungry, innovative employees in the company.
It means that the voluntary redundancy packages offered by companies need to be attractive, so for the employee it provides them with safeguards that they can feel secure in their jobs and their lives.
In the end it’s a balancing act between consideration for the human, versus pure unbridled entrepreneurship.
This is not the case in Spotifys country. It is first in last out. You can get around it by creating a team and letting the whole team go or if they have been given multiple warnings without improvement.
This is absolutely tragic. A set of data that large, beautiful, and accessible is very rare. I would go so far as to call it culturally significant. I have to consider canceling my subscription.
Spotify hasn’t made a profit in years. At some point, you have to start making the hard decisions and let people go - but not Joe Rogan, they still need to pay him $250 million while letting his content go to other platforms.
Is that evidence that it’s a good deal? From the outside Spotify doesn’t seem like a company that makes good financial decisions. The Rogan deal seems central in that.
Do they ever publish ad revenue or user stats by content. I’ve not seen it in their filings. And the new deal is on its face worse. They are paying the same for no exclusivity!
I’m just not sure how to objectively judge the Rogan deal but it certainly seems very bad to me, an uninterested party.
Yes. Evidence the old one was good. They had a Long time to think about it and clearly decided it’s worth even more. (And there is no interest free funny money)
I know there is an internet archive version of the site, but is there anyway to download a dump of this site (along with all the sample music associated with the genres) for offline usage/access?
Such a shame. I am, or have been, a pretty avid Spotify user. I have some 100s of playlists there as I came into a rhythm of pegging a playlist to a year and a quarter. However, I'm more and more leaving that behind and starting to use NTS Radio. I discover more, and it's so much cheaper.
I do not know about EveryNoiseAOnce. But I felt sad when spotifynewmusic.com [a convenient music discovery service, facaded as Spotify playlists] was closed.
More than half of my prefered albums were discovered through spotifynewmusic.com, at the time.
Creator of everynoise.com laid off from Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39111730 - Jan 2024 (63 comments)
Glenn McDonald, founder of Every Noise at Once, gets laid off from Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38650917 - Dec 2023 (2 comments)
Everynoise.com May Stop Working - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572857 - Dec 2023 (2 comments)
Everynoise.com Is Going Away - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38557103 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Everynoise.com may be shutting down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38540333 - Dec 2023 (3 comments)
Every Noise at Once "warning: The exact future of this site is uncertain" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38519343 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Also:
Every Noise at Once: ASMR - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556156 - Nov 2022 (3 comments)
Every Noise at Once - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190470 - July 2022 (1 comment)
Every Noise at Once - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668426 - April 2021 (94 comments)
Every Noise at Once - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20585447 - Aug 2019 (82 comments)
Every Noise at Once – an algorithmically-generated scatter-plot of musical genre - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269685 - Sept 2015 (23 comments)