Glenn McDonald is one of the brains behind Spotify wrapped. Photo: Samuel Robinson, RNZ
You might not have heard of music brain Glenn McDonald, but you're almost certainly familiar with the work of the "data alchemist".
Every year, towards the end of November, music streaming giant Spotify assesses mountains of listening data and sends users a snapshot of their habits called 'Spotify Wrapped'. It stitches together our top artists, tracks and genres, it counts up the minutes we listened, and new music we learned along the way. The increasingly personalised playlists and microgenres have excited users who run to flex their Wrapped results online.
McDonald, Spotify's former "data alchemist", was one of the brains behind it all.
"I was involved with wrapped just about every year," he told RNZ via a Zoom call from San Francisco, en route to Auckland for the Going Global Music Summit at Roundhead Studios on Thursday.
"Most of the years, I did the analysis for the genre story myself. Last year, I did the one about 'your dark side', where you get a tarot card. The year before, there was one called 'your listening personality', I did that too. Almost every year I did something, playlists, stories, analysis ... just not the horoscope one."
McDonald was hired by the streaming giant 12 years ago and given the keys to an endless amount of listening data. He experimented, made prototypes, figured out algorithms, and worked with engineers to see what could be made of it all.
In 2018, he created Every Noise at Once - an encyclopaedia mapping every genre hosted on the platform. Though it wasn't an official feature of Spotify, users flocked to it as a tool to discover new music.
Glenn McDonald, Spotify's former data alchemist, is one of the brains behind Spotify Wrapped. Photo: Spotify
Every noise on Spotify was given a name - from discofox and deep tropical house, to aarhus indie, weirdcore and Balkan folk metal. As of December 2023, when McDonald was laid-off amongst 1500 Spotify staff, there were more than 6200 genres to explore - none of them made up - unless they absolutely had to be. According to Billboard, there are 56 varieties of reggae, 202 kinds of folk and 230 types of hip hop, on Spotify.
"These genres are things in the world and mostly have names. Part of the interesting thing about having 600 million people listing them [on Spotify] is you can sometimes find emergent communities, almost before the people in them are fully aware they're emerging, sometimes before they've chosen a name for themselves.
"The funny names for things usually came because nobody had named them, and if I made up a name for them, maybe people would find them."
Some of the ones McDonald did make up were 'laboratorio' ie. "music that sounds like it was made in a laboratory", and 'escape room' ("a trap pop kind of dance crossover") which piqued music-lovers' attention after popping up on 2020 Wrapped playlists.
McDonald has made a career distilling insights from masses of music data - and it all came together quite naturally to him. He always loved music and spent many years of his life working jobs designing data software. He also wrote a music review column for 10 years.
These days, he's a technology strategtist, and recently wrote a book, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music.
Since launching in 2008, Spotify has changed the way we listen, collect, share and categorise music. However, it has copped its fair share of criticism over the years, mainly over artist compensation.
Unlike physical sales of CDs or records, or downloads, which award artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the artist's "market share"- the number of streams of their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service. Artists like Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke have criticised the policy, and even withdrew their music from Spotify for a period of time.
McDonald says streaming revenue is tough for artists, but he believes the technology has rescued the music business.
"The good news is for aspiring, unknown artists, there's no technical barrier for them to be as successful as Drake, but the truth is the social and attention economy barriers are not that much changed from what they were in 1980.
"If you were not on a major label, then you're probably not gonna get your song in movies, you're probably not gonna get on playlists, you're probably not gonna be known by many people, it's just a numbers game.
"And streaming is, in many ways, better in monetary terms; you don't have to convince people to buy a very expensive CD, expensive in terms of the amount of money someone's probably gonna spend on music in a year, and you can get the attention of people through playlists."
Glenn McDonald is speaking at the Going Global Music Summit at Roundhead Studios in Auckland on Thursday 29 August.