Every Noise at Once

“Until 2024, Spotify categorized every bit of its music into a very specific tree of genres, and one of the engineers responsible for that categorization maintained an amazing interactive site describing them all. Best of all, there are samples of everything. The site is still up and working, even if the taxonomy has stopped being refreshed. It is vast. It’s a remarkable place to spend an afternoon clicking through.”

“I love to reference this whenever I feel like i'm in a music slump. Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com) is a massive, interactive music discovery site and genre map created by former Spotify employee, Glenn McDonald. It displays thousands of distinct genres in a sprawling scatter plot. You can click any genre to hear an example of what it sounds like, and trace it even further to see a map of the artists associated with that particular genre. A general guide for navigating this massive word cloud? Down veers more organic (classical, early music ensemble, traditional), and up steers you in an electric, more mechanical direction (house, techno, trance). Left is dense and atmospheric (post rock, doom metal, ambient), while right is spikier and bouncier (afrobeat, salsa, rap). Unsurprisingly, pop primarily resides somewhere in the midst of the madness, mixing and melding with other genres. My current favs? singing bowl, 528hz, djembe, no wave, dub poetry, and egg punk just to name a few”

“from @Joe: Until 2024, Spotify categorized every bit of its music into a very specific tree of genres, and one of the engineers responsible for that categorization maintained an amazing interactive site describing them all. Best of all, there are samples of everything. The site is still up and working, even if the taxonomy has stopped being refreshed. It is vast. It’s a remarkable place to spend an afternoon clicking through.”