Among all the sites I use to discover new sounds, there’s one that holds a really special place: everynoise.com.
It’s a bit of a crazy project, launched more than ten years ago, that literally maps out every musical genre in the world, with an ultra-minimal interface but infinite sonic richness.
I use it a lot, especially to dig into styles like blackgaze and shoegaze, and all their dreamy or aggressive variations. Thanks to this site, I’ve discovered plenty of small indie bands that are often little known, sometimes self-released, but always interesting.
A simple tool, but incredibly effective
You land on a page full of genre names. You click on one of them (post-black metal, blackgaze, shoegaze…), and you end up either on a representative audio clip or on a list of related artists.
You can then explore neighboring genres, as if you were moving across a sonic map. It’s intuitive, and it pushes you out of your musical comfort zone. No recommendations based on your history, just raw curiosity.
What I found there
Personally, I mostly use it to dig into everything related to hazy, noisy atmospheres: blackgaze, shoegaze, black metal… and sometimes even nichier styles.
That’s how I stumbled onto self-released bands with 300 plays, a single EP on Bandcamp, and a vibe that spoke to me directly. Discoveries that Spotify will never suggest to me.
A project on borrowed time
In December 2023, Glenn McDonald, the site’s creator, was laid off by Spotify. He lost access to the internal data needed to keep Every Noise updated.
Since then, the site has been running on a snapshot frozen at the end of 2023. Some features are still accessible, but its long-term survival is uncertain.
And honestly, it makes me sad. Because this kind of independent, free and passionate project, you don’t see often. And watching it slowly fade is truly heartbreaking.
A word from Every Noise’s creator
“With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site’s 10-year history and evolution, hosted on my own server.” — Glenn McDonald
He also adds:
“Spotify seems to have finally completed the process of discontinuing everything I worked on by switching the “genres” in the Spotify API from my human-supervised genre system to ML-assigned keyword tags. […] I mind, and so have switched the genre search, NRbG, Curio and other genre-lookup functions on this site to use the internal dataset originally derived from the map above. This means that new artists who entered the world in the last year aren’t automatically being genre-categorized, but it also restores the possibility of doing that manually in my data, so hmm.”
Now what?
Despite everything, Glenn keeps up what he can:
- New Releases by Genre: a decentralized version using your own Spotify API key.
- Curio: a playlist exploration and editing tool connected to your account.
Everything now rests on his personal motivation and a bit of open source magic.
Conclusion
Every Noise at Once remains, for me, one of the best sites ever created for discovering music. It let me broaden my horizons and find artists I would never have come across otherwise.
I hope it keeps existing in some form. And if it disappears one day, I’ll be glad to have made the most of it while it lasted.
Long live free music. Thank you, Glenn, for your work and your determination.