One of my favourite music websites is in jeopardy. This is not good.

A few years back, I was tipped off about Every Noise at Once, a website that not only tries to list every single genre of music out there but to connect all the dots between them. It’s a fascinating visual depiction of what we listen to. You can get lost for hours–and you’ll learn a lot. This screenshot is just a portion of the home screen.

Every Noise at Once is the creation of Glenn McDonald, a data scientist at Spotify. He took all of Spotify’s genre classifications and found a way to plot them in an understandable way. Thank you, Glenn.

There’s a problem, however. Glenn was one of the 1500 people who was let go in December, part of a 17% employee cull. This means he no longer has access to all of Spotify’s internal data, which means he can’t properly maintain and expand Every Noise at Once. This is causing much angst in some quarters.

Here’s hoping that Spotify will figure something out. It would be a very bad thing for such a useful website to be allowed to wither away.