Each school on the site has a corresponding color that symbolizes the mood of each school’s playlist. McDonald incorporated ideas from another of his websites, Every Noise At Once, into the Every School At Once site. He believes the number of accounts with BU email addresses is in the “low thousands,” which provides a solid sample size for a school with over 33,000 graduate and undergraduate students. In order to represent the widest variety of music possible, McDonald allows only one song per artist on the playlist.

Other differently popular songs at BU: “Savage Good Boy,” by Japanese Breakfast, “Brando,” by Lucy Dacus, and “Way It Goes,” by Hippo Campus. The rapper Aminé, who performed at BU in April 2019, appears on the playlist, too. He added that often artists who performed at a certain school end up on that school’s playlist. According to the BU playlist, “Stay Home,” by the on-campus a cappella group BU Allegrettos, is the most differently popular song among BU listeners.

“Differently popular” songs are what McDonald wants to find for every school. “I know they like Justin Bieber everywhere, but what I was, ‘What’s differently popular?’” “It was Justin Bieber,” McDonald says of the first song on the playlist. He expected to hear something different from what he heard on American radio. Once he got access to the listening data, he browsed the top-50 songs most listened to in the Philippines. When his former company Echo Nest was bought by Spotify, he says, he could not wait to sift through the music streaming giant’s data. “Absolute popularity within the subset of people, and what share of global popularity that represents.”įor Boston University’s playlist, that subset of people consists of Spotify accounts connected to email addresses ending in “bu.edu.”Īs a data alchemist, it is McDonald’s job to find innovative new ways to use listening data. “There are two factors” in the algorithm, says McDonald, who graduated from Harvard in 1989 and lives in Cambridge. McDonald created a program called Every School At Once, which looks at listening data from the streaming app’s accounts that are linked to university email addresses and creates a playlist for each school using an algorithm. Thanks to Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, you can find out. Have you walked down Commonwealth Avenue, seen all the headphones in people’s ears, and wondered what exactly everyone is listening to?

Spotify playlist covers