Glenn McDonald

Glenn McDonald (born in 1967 in Texas, U.S.) is a former employee of the music and audio streaming company Spotify who was responsible for grouping and naming genres at the company. Often described by media as a "data alchemist", he created the music discovery website Every Noise at Once.

In 2019, McDonald's metadata contributions to Spotify's algorithm, which drew from Every Noise at Once, led to the creation of the influential "hyperpop" Spotify playlist. Led by senior editor Lizzy Szabo, the playlist became instrumental in the wider popularization of the movement. Career McDonald worked for a time at the music intelligence firm The Echo Nest. This company was acquired by Spotify in 2013, and the genre mapping data created by McDonald was built into various Spotify features, including its "Daily Mix" and "Fans also like" recommendation functions. He created the Every Noise at Once website that year. Under Spotify, he continued to work as part of a team to categorize tracks from about one million artists into 6,291 named genres, including 56 kinds of reggae, 202 kinds of folk and 230 kinds of hip hop. He developed an algorithm for the company which evaluated music based on what he called "subjective psychoacoustic attributes", including "tempo," "duration," "color," "modernity," and "femininity." He then named what he called "emerging genres" himself, including the Spotify genre Escape Room, so named because of its sonic connection to trap music. In 2018, McDonald input the genre name "hyperpop" into this metadata through the algorithm of his site Every Noise at Once, which was later used to name Spotify's influential "Hyperpop" playlist, led by senior editor Lizzy Szabo, which later involved guest curation from 100 gecs and others in the scene. The playlist contributed to the movement's wider popularity in the early 2020s.