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