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1. What is the value of music?
   This book gives you a peek inside the mind of a thoughtful music recommendation engineer who’s totally in love with his subject. While a lot of engineers use math to turn culture into technical problems so they can forget about art, this guy is different. With his experience at Spotify, he’s seen it all and finds the sweet spot between being critical and practical about music recommendations.On the critical side, he talks about the creepy surveillance of streaming apps, the limits of what machines can learn, the lack of transparency, the lottery-like nature of discovery algorithms, and how streaming can turn us into passive listeners. On the practical side, he breaks down how artist similarity, vector embeddings, and Discover Weekly work, making the tech behind music recommendations easy to understand and not so scary.By balancing these two views, he tackles the big question: how do we come together to value music? If you’re into this topic, the book won’t give you easy answers, but it’ll definitely teach you a lot and get you thinking.

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2. Great read for a music lover with penchant for technology
   Fascinating look into just how much music is available with a single click, how it is recommended to you and ideas on what you should do about it. As a music lover, a musician and a day job in tech, after reading this book, I want to have coffee with Glenn!

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3. Great stuff
   The book is a series of stories about streaming music, the music industry, recommendations, and listening that often have a theme of data analysis. A fun read if you are into music, streaming, and data and wonder about why things are the ways they are, where they came from, where they are going, and the challenges involved.

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4. For the exploratory listener
   Author Glenn McDonald writes about his experiences in the music streaming industry and gives readers a guide for getting the most out of this exciting technology. If you are really into music, you could probably do more to find more of what you love, and McDonald is as fervent as anyone about connecting people with more music. He created everynoise.com, an incredible site dedicated to categorizing all the 6000+ genres of music, and not nearly enough people are aware of how much more music they could absolutely love. Pretty far into the book he explains how to get the most out if it (it’s exactly what I have been doing): type in an artist, look at the genres given, check out the playlists, repeat. Alternatively look at the “cloud” and listen to genres near what you already like. If you want to hear a genre on Spotify, search for “the sounds of ___[genre]____” and you will get a very long playlist. Try “drone metal” or “traditional blues” or “mbira.” Soon you’ll be delightfully overwhelmed!YOU STILL NEED TO BUY THIS BOOK because McDonald was famously laid off from Spotify, leaving everynoise in the lurch. This book is extremely professional and supportive of Spotify, and the author seems like a great guy in the face of all this. PAY THIS MAN!There is a lot of discussion about how artists get paid (it’s fairer than you think); his own very amusing GenX journey though music; his view of the evolution of streaming and music; how streaming may affect future creation of music for good and bad; and his sense of the ethics of all this.As a 125,000 minutes-per-year Spotify listener, I found this enjoyable and useful.

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5. Terrible quality
   I am very disappointed with the quality of this book. After reading just a few pages, two pages fell apart. The binding is terrible. Not recommended.

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6. Great book

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7. Edu-tainment equates to a hybrid of educational and entertaining in equal measure, and that’s the clever balance Glenn McDonald has struck here. You don’t quite know what you are in for based on the cover and promotion, but once “in” – buckle up and enjoy the ride.The knowledge and first hand experience the author brings makes this time well spent, but there’s a rhythm to his writing – a complex argument is distilled down into a sentence or two, followed by a poetic turn of phrase that makes his points stick in your dome as you turn the next page.This is a good book, a damn good book, and it’ll be time well spent and you’ll be better for it, be it if you are a creator, platform or consumer of music. After all, it takes all three to tango, these days.

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