Glenn McDonald Author

Glenn McDonald is a software engineer, algorithm designer and Data Alchemist at Spotify, the world’s biggest music streaming service.

From the 1990s, he was one of the earliest and most prolific explorers of how to use data to understand and amplify our collective and individual experiences of music, and became principal engineer at The Echo Nest, a US music-tech start-up.

On its takeover by Spotify in 2014, he became its only ‘Data Alchemist,’ putting him at the algorithmic heart of streaming music. He has access to the listening habits of 400 million people. He also runs Everynoise. com, a dynamic computational map also of the world’s music genres.