I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. Or if the major record labels already license their entire catalogs for training purposes cheaply enough, so this really is just solely intended as a preservation effort?
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
> Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff.
The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
They have a page directly addressed to AI companies, offering them "enterprise-level" access to their complete archives in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. AI may not be their original/primary motivation but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing.
You go where the money is. Infra isn’t free. Churches pass the plate every Sunday. Perhaps one day we’ll exist in a more optimal socioeconomic system; until then, you do what you have to do to accomplish your goals (in this context, archivists and digital preservation).
There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.
Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?
Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.
I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.
If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.
Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
> Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
Value is subjective. Ownership is not. You're attempting to perform a sleight of hand by conflating the two.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money. But I have a right to expect that e.g. code I develop in my toolkit will remain my own to provide me an income.
Sort of? The contract doesn't mention that "value" and "price" are just as often negatively correlated as positively so, though, and claims the opposite (always positive correlation), hence where the shared delusion comes in.
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
Currency (or IOU's, handshakes, pieces of green paper, bits on a disc, etc) is just an abstraction allows one to have choice.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”
Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.
> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
> I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video
Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.
My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)
Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
The worldwide median internet download bandwidth is about 100 Mbps, which is far enough for HD or bluray video. The technical barrier can be as low as 'click to search, click to download' in some user-friendly BT clients. That being said, the price of these subscriptions is a problem that actually needs to be solved.
Anyone is free to release under free use in our current system. You already can live with the benefits of no IP law by just limiting yourself to those people that chose to to release this way.
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.
I am. Copyright is fucking cancer and is one of the worst things if not the worst things that exists to make creating new things harder.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
Everyone is doing it, who Cates anymore. Genie's out of the bottle, we could've tried to solve this for decades and yet we didn't so now we reap what we sowed. Happens, move on.
I don’t think any of them are breaking even when you consider the maintenance costs, I just thought it was kind of funny considering the nature of the line of work they are in.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
That made me chuckle, Enterprise Level Access. I mean as ai company, that’s incredibly cheap and instead of torrenting something, why get it. That price is just a fraction of a engineers salary.
I think there is a big legal difference between helping preserve
books and papers with little regard for copyrights, to then turn
around and selling access to large companies.
So either these folks, who are admittedly living targets of all the world's copyright lawyers, have means to receive tens of thousands of USD anonymously and stealthily,
or they are totally immune to deanon / getting tracked down,
or they are stupid enough to allow their greed to become their downfall,
or this legend about underground warriors of light fighting against evil copyrighters is utter bullshit.
> I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
Having an IoT device with security vulnerabilities does not automatically make you vulnerable to botnets because it’s behind your router’s NAT under normal conditions.
Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices.
The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection
Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
Nope, many IoT devices open ports via UPnP. The biggest botnets are composed of (among other things) smart plugs, baby monitors, doorbells, IP cameras...
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect.
And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
I think the people seeding these are also ideologs and so would be interested in also supporting the obscure stuff, maybe more than the popular. There is no way any casual listeners would go to the quite substantial trouble of using these archives.
Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
It's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close.
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
> Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
Until they decide to silence the artist you want to listen to because emperor god trump decides to unperson them.
Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
>I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience
> Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
It's absolutely not all, I'm an extremely casual listener, not 'into' music or anything, and I have plenty in a playlist that have disappeared (mostly I don't even know what they are, it's just greyed out with no information) for whatever reason. And that's just the stuff that was there at some point that I liked.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Spotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
> They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then.
Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain.
And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.
What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work.
For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/
This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.
Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
I get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
This doesn't do much for the argument that artists only do art for money. Everyone knows what happens to free use art, same as what happens to FOSS: corpos bundle it up and sell it back to people.
By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.
fwiw, the vast majority of my working musician friends (who do also hold day jobs) would rather you pirate their music than stream it on spotify. they make basically all of their income from music via touring, streaming income might pay for a coffee or two a month.
> Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?
No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?
That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
Yes, as long as they have enough to survive, people generally have some free time. I know someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and they make music as a hobby. Obviously, if you have to work 16 hours a day to survive they wouldn't do it – or at least they wouldn't have the capacity to share it.
"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or
streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
Flippant response: If it's ok for Meta for commercial use, why not for researchers for legitimate research work?
More serious response: research is explicitly included in fair use protections in US copyright law. News organizations regularly use leaked / stolen copyrighted material in investigative journalism.
A little off topic, but I remain naively hopeful that the horror you describe will keep Spotify from going down the same road Netflix did once content owners decided to get into the streaming business themselves, so that streaming a movie today requires you to "change the channel" to whichever service offers that movie.
Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10/month subscription?
Self-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don't give a damn is telling.
Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.
I can't think of many situations where that would be particularly valuable, considering it favours recent plays and the cutoff date is already almost half a year old.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?
I dunno if they publish like a 10 TB torrent of the most popular music I can see people making their own music services. A 10 TB hard disk is easily affordable, and that's about 3 million songs which is way more than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, even if you reduce that by 100x to account for taste.
It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...
The problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators.
An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.
In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.
I'm not ideologically opposed to AI. The problem will get worse because while the quality of the music will improve, it will still be bad and there will also be a lot more of it.
We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing.
If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.
>The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumer
it's an archive to defend against Spotify going away. Remember when Netflix had everything, and then that eroded and now you can only rely on stuff that Netflix produced itself?
the average consumer will flock when Spotify ultimately enshitifies
The bit in the blog post about the amount of music uploaded yearly to Spotify was shocking.
I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
> but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
There is. And most people would not even recognize a lot of AI music without multiple listens and digging through things like "is there any online presence (which can also be easily spoofed)".
I've fallen into the trap myself with some (pretty generic) blues music
Ah yes. The reason is because all the money is in the chill music. And not in the fact that the most formulaic genres get flooded with easily generated music ("chill work" music especially doesn't even need sophisticated AI, a random number generator would work).
And that's before we ask the question of how to identify AI-generated music (no one asks that question, but everyone wants it removed).
But, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.
> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
Yes, but it's still the required correction to your claim. I actually don't know how many podcasts are using their publishing platform. I imagine it's considerably more than a dozen.
They want to own something but it's always going to be a drop in the ocean. They have a small new music label thing called RADAR but I imagine the failure rate on that is very high. They need to buy a label if they want to meaningfully change this. Just like Amazon now owns MGM and Netflix maybe getting Warner Bros. Presumably they can't afford to do this, and I don't think that integration would work as well in the music industry.
This, indeed, has mostly implications for ML, training, etc. As otherwise the whole catalog is available to partners, but costs a lot. So Anna did indeed liberate the content, but I'm definitely not switching off my Spotify subscription, even though, in my personal taste, neither quality, nor UI does match Apple Music. It is still useful to have s.o. serve the content for you.
>> But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Didn't Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They're too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.
They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook annual revenue is about it twice that of the entire global recording industry. The strategy these companies took was probably correct but that calculation included the high risk of ultimately having to pay out down the line. Don’t mistake their current resistance to paying for an internal belief they never will have to.
> They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook [...]
I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement.
First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt.
Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
DRM aside, Spotify clearly should have logic that throttles your account based on requests (only so many minutes in a day..), making it entirely impractical to download the entirety of it unless you have millions of accounts.
This is probably how they did it, over time, was use a few thousand accounts and queued up all the things, and download everything over the course of a year.
Just like with anything digital you (and Spotify) are fully at the mercy of the rights holders. When (not if) they pull their stuff, or replace their stuff, or change their stuff, you can never get the original back unless you preserve it.
Largest example: a lot of Russian music is not available on Spotify because of the Russia-Ukrane war, and Spotify pulling out of Russia. So they don't have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.
I wouldn't call this very effective. It would take an impractically long amount of time to capture a meaningful fraction of the collection and quality would suffer greatly.
Even if you plug the audio output into the input you would still be taking a quality loss by passing the audio through a DAC and then an ADC. Maybe if the quality of your hardware is good enough it wouldn't matter, but then you would be limited to only ripping 24 hours of audio per day...
You don't have to pass it through a DAC. There's no equivalent of HDCP for protecting digital audio end to end. Crudely, you could capture S/PDIF but really, skip that and just output to a virtual audio device for recording. No DAC in the path either way.
They recently started offering lossless, could you get down to the equivalent of 320kbps?
I grew up on sites like Suprnova, and quickly found I could not discern the difference between 320 mp3s and lossless.
Even now, I only seem to notice if I use a very high end pair of headphones, and mostly with electronic music that has a lot of soft parts with sounds that are in the low or high end of the spectrum.
Yes they do use DRM. I know they are using Widevine on the web player, but possibly other ones too (never looked very far). Not sure for the app, it might be that it is using OGG streams with a custom DRM (which is probably the one some existing downloaders actually (ab)use).
Let me start over. Youtube itself has DRM required for certain videos, and certain formats of videos.
The 256 kbps format for music will be protected by DRM. If you do not have DRM available youtube will fallback to a lower quality format to play the auduo.
Music might have higher quality audio-only files as provided where Youtube might have it combined with video and a generic compression algorithm applied as with all other uploaded videos.
Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?
They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.
That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like.
Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.
And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.
Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.
As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.
(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.
(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)
(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).
That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?
> Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not
No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".
The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.
After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.
> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.
Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.
The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.
Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.
They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.
I just started DJing and something I quickly noticed is how garbage Spotify's music sounds compared to FLACs I've purchased. The max bitrate is very low.
I am providing my own music on Spotify via a distributor I a pay 50 Euros once.
What do I get from Spotify? Basically nothing! It is not the rightholders as I am the rightholder! Spotify is a scam for artist.
They don't pay any artist who has less than 1000/Streams per Song per Year.
They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments.
Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify.
If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch.
I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about.
Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em.
Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars.
youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money.
now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.
> most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control.
Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
I think it was was Les Claypool (of the band Primus) who said on some podcast that recording a studio album with its attendant very non-trivial costs is really just creating a very expensive business card to hand out to prospective clients.
Back then, that is. It probably cost $250k in 1990 for them to record Frizzle Fry in a studio, handwave $500k in 2025 dollars. But Bandcamp on MacBook and some gear from GuitarStudio, round to $15k and your time. neither of which isn't trivial or cheap, but it's not 1990 no more.
> I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales.
i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture.
Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream.
That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams.
I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly.
also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists.
piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.
Unless you're a small potato. Approximately 0% of what I pay for spotify goes to the artists I actually listen to. Fucking Taylor Swift and the Beatles estate don't need my money.
There is a reason people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly, it's how they make money. Weird Al is known for his amazing live shows, there's a reason for it: they make more money.
Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.
Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).
> Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.
What are the rough rates for each pool? That's the important part here. And how many artists are far enough from the average ratio that the detail of two pools matters.
I'd be interested in knowing that too, as far as I know Spotify doesn't publish details to the public at least.
But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India.
Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices.
We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already.
Anything that gives different value to different artists is probably going to favor the big ones and just make things worse.
CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it.
The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.
Maybe not the best comparison to anything. Swift is known for being an even better busiensswoman than artist and obsessed with having control.
She screwed her record company for profits, not the other way around. Not many people have done that. She's likely making money on both ends of the stick.
When he says "so if I'm doing the math right that means I earned $12" I interpret that as him exaggerating for effect. It's definitely not him citing the pay slip.
"$2 or more per thousand streams, split across rightsholders" seems like an accurate estimate.
Assume an artist (either directly or through a rights holder) makes 1/3 income from streaming, 1/3 from merch and physical albums, and 1/3 from live events.
40m streams per year would be 800k per week. 200k fans worldwide playing 4 times per week on average could get you there. Thats like a decent sized but not enormous youtube channel.
200k fans worldwide would also support the ticket sales and merchandise sales aspects.
99% of that 10 billion went to a handful of artists. Actually, I'd wager nearly half of it went to labels and other middlemen, but that's beside the point. The vast majority of money in the music industry never trickles down, ever.
edit: I looked it up, 70% of spotify's payouts go directly to labels, not artists. So...that $10 bil is nothing.
This is by design and it's the same broken system that metallica defended in the 90s/00s because it benefits large artists while fucking over the other 99%.
We keep repeating the same script using the same busted short term logic.
Not true at all. I support small artists and it's the only way they make money. Ticket sales and merch make up the vast majority of artist revenue for artists who arent in the top 1%. Most musicians don't make money if they aren't touring or selling merch somehow.
there's also the invaluable aspect of networking that touring allows. bit of a tangent, but it's very important for musicians to network.
The exception are musicians who do production stuff. Think movie/tv scores, commercials, etc. I actually know a handful of artists who used to tour quite a lot but eventually settled down to do production stuff. So they transitioned from touring to make money to production. Touring all year with no healthcare catches up to people.
I know a number of musicians that tour nightclubs, small venues, and festivals.
They make a living; not a luxurious one, but they do OK. They just enjoy making music, and feel that it's worth it. Many of them never even record their music.
> Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?
The first users of this dataset will be Big Tech corps. Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple will all be happy to use this dataset for training their LLMs.
Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?
This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"
Well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
How does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There's virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.
Personally as an artist I'd rather give it to people directly for free but I'll meet the audience where they are. The "compensation" does not factor into it at all.
Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)
I believe that we need to distinguish between convenience and preservation here. It is indeed convenient for consumers to use Spotify now whilst it exists and operates the way it does. They could go under, they could change their business model, they could decide to purge everything that is not easily justifiable commercially.
As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.
Id be stunned if we didn't find out Anna's Archive is a front for a handful of shadier VCs who are into AI. Even if AA themselves don't know it and just take the cash.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners
Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify
and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is
becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as
much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also
listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my
primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything
else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that
Google controls this.)
To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering.
I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.
Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.
> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there
So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.
I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.
They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.
No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.
> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.
Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.
Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.
What.cd were extreme sticklers for quality! When you applied to get in, they did a live interview on IRC to test your knowledge of ripping, transcoding, and different kinds of compression, how torrents and private trackers work, and their code of conduct. I remember studying for it. They also had ways to make sure you weren't cheating like checking your screen, as well as very aggressive automated checks for VPNs and blocklisted IPs to prevent ban evasion and multiple accounts.
They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.
Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!
It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.
Another comment mentioned Redacted.sh as a successor. I haven't used it. I'm sure there's a subreddit around that can help. Looks like orpheus is another option if I'm reading correctly. You have to get an invite or pass an "interview" though, so be prepared to wait a while.
Yeah, What.CD had a bunch of the local Brisbane post-rock bands from the 00s on there which was amazing to me. I at least have copies of a lot of their records!
True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.
This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.
That's why I use YouTube Music as my streamer as they allow damned near anyone to upload any old rare record and then figure out the royalties somehow.
Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular.
I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.
Generally speaking, trackers that require a ratio above 1.0 and don't have freeleech/point system are designed so that you pay the website to fix your ratio and/or rent a seedbox from one of their partner.
It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0.
And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really.
(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
This, a thousand times this. I have gone back to collecting CDs because it's often the only remaining way (short of pircay) to get original masters of many artists. Even lossless download stores like Qobuz don't have them.
Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).
You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
>We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
They're still kind of around, but yeah, everything is very much on it's way out in the music scene, at least in terms of that late 90s early 00s culture. Or has been until recently. There is a renewed interest in self-hosting and "offline" style music collections.
It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes. When self-hosting music comes up this is always one of the top questions people have: How do you find new music?
The answer isn't that hard and really hasn't changed much. People just don't want to spend any time or effort doing it. Music stores still exist, they're amazing. Lots of 2nd hand stores carry vinyl and CDs now, which can give you great ideas for new music. There are self-hosted AI solutions and tools. Last.fm and Scrobbling are still very much around. My scrobble history is so insanely useful. There are music discords. Friends. Asking people what they're listening to in public. Live shows with unique openers(I once went to a Ben Kweller show with 4 opening bands, I still listen to 3 of them.)
Some local radio DJs frequently play songs I enjoy that have under 1K plays on youtube. No algo or platform is surfacing those. Local radio gets me both local and international music. A friend of mine prefers critically acclaimed stuff, so he streams radio shows from NTS and the like.
> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.
I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.
Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.
So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.
Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.
I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.
Soulseek has to be the best kept secret on the internet. Even people my age who grew up with things like Napster, Limewire, and even soulseek, don’t know that it still exists.
That being sad, I have a lot of non-mainstream tracks in my playlists on YouTube Music that have YouTube comments along the line of “I wish this was available on Spotify :’(“. I bet the same goes for What.CD.
So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.
about the scale, the same album in the tracker had several submissions, for dedicated format and regional editions.
while one can compare in terms of number of tracks, the quality used to be in another level altogether. from the article:
> The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s.
meanwhile the tracker had 16/24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track's metadata was verified for any artifacts. for the given quality, one could rip youtube music (maybe not as easily anymore) and achieve a larger scale in a similar quality level.
now if hypothetically tidal had all the music of the world and was accessible this way, then it would be a comparable resource. insane regardless.
> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth.
It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.
There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.
And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.
This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite:
- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included
- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.
I just found out that https://annas-archive.li/ is masked by my German internet provider (SIM.de/Drillisch).
I usually use a VPN but I had it switched off temp. to watch Fallout (Prime Video won't let you watch through a VPN). Only when I switched Mullvad back on could I open the site.
The wikipedia article seems to concur with you, although this seems to be a voluntary policy by CUII, the members could still decide to not wait for any court orders and block whatever they want.
I think it's a DNS level block. I've been using NextDNS (free plan) and one side effect (besides auto ad block) is that it doesn't have those blocks. Highly recommend - there are alternative services as well, just saw NextDNS recommended here.
In that vein, I am trying to find out why searching for
alextud popcorntime
which should trivially yield http://github.com/alextud/PopcornTimeTV results in anything but that one particular URL in every search engine: Google, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Bing
They even find a fork of that particular repo, which in turn links back to it, but refuse to show the result I want. Have't found any DMCA notices. What is going on?
You know, I had the (at time of writing) 600 something comments ran through Opus 4.5 and do a summary of the sentiments. It could't find a single comment that genuinely defends Spotify or expresses sympathy for the company.
HN crowd is, of course, biased in the technocratic sense, but you see - everyone seems to actually rejoice the move.
The closest to remorse is `linhns` and `locusofself` expressing concern about artists getting hurt (not Spotify itself), but locusofself prefaces with "I hate spotify as a company but..."
I recall many interesting tracks that were very aggressively deleted from all platforms in sync. I wonder if I could find them in this archive.
There is contemporary lost media being created every day because of how we distribute things now. I think in some cases, the intent of the publisher was to literally destroy every copy of the information. I understand the legal arguments for this, but from a spiritual perspective, this is one of the most offensive things I can imagine. Intentionally destroying all copies of a creative work is simply evil. I don't care how you frame it.
Making media effectively lost is not much different in my mind. Is it available if it's sitting on a tape in an iron mountain bunker that no one will ever look at again?
50 free accounts continually streaming music rack up 20 TB in a month. So that would take about 1.5 years. Our you use 750 accounts and do it in a month.
I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.
That’s if they pretend to stream the music. If they are using throwaway free accounts I imagine they can download the DRM-stripped files much more quickly.
It is not hard. But please don't misuse it and ruin the fun for everyone. It is nice to be able to use the music relatively easily for hobby projects. My music server has functionality to play tracks from Spotify this way:
I wonder how many premium accounts Anna’s Archive had to use to scrape the whole thing. Surely Spotify has scrape protection and wouldn’t allow a single account to stream (download) millions of separate tracks.
to use this method of scraping, logging in with a premium account is required.
so either they found a way around that lock, but not the quality lock, or they just decided 160k is good enough (it generally is), and decided to stick with that for filesize & bandwidth savings
I haven't looked at the code but I would be surprised if the premium account "requirement" is anything more than an if statement that can be commented out.
What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be.
My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.
My understanding, based on a related comment in this thread, was that premium accounts get higher quality; in that case, I figured any such checks would be server-side.
If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.
Hm, maybe. I don't remember whether they offer higher quality. If they do, it would make sense to have that check on the server side. It's been a while since I last used Spotify because they deleted my account in 2022 without warning when they left Russia.
But I was referring specifically to all third-party reverse-engineered Spotify players requiring premium accounts to function at all.
Seems like librespot is not directly suppporting the fetching of audio to files, and intentionally so, in order to not get targeted by Spotify.
Obviously you can dump the audio to file as it "plays", but that would be be very slow.
So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.
"at scale" could mean they had direct access to a server or to storage, maybe because they had an insider giving them access, or they found secrets that had leaked somewhere?
There are tools that actually download directly from Spotify (needs premium then) but yeah most of them just use the search and download from other sources like YouTube without mentioning it. I won't say which tools download directly out of fear that they get killed but they exist.
Truly amazing work. I couldn't help but being sad of the less popular songs not being currently stored, as those are definitely the ones more in risk of being lost forever.
If you like the goal and you have even a few 100gb available on your server, consider "donating" some of that space to seeding the data (music or books). It's absolutely how we can fight the system, even if just a tiny bit. https://annas-archive.org/torrents
Going off the blog post, archiving the rest of Spotify (which only represents 0.4% of total listens) would bring the total size up to something like 1PB, and would likely include a huge amount of AI generated stuff, which I don't think is worth it. I'd rather see them focus resources on archiving other stuff.
You'd hope there is room for a lot of stuff in between as well. I tried searching for some of yhe more unknown artists I follow (and have bought stuff from!) but didn't see any clear way to filter it to Spotify/music metadata only. Restricting to metadata+other cuts it down somewhat but it's still 100s of results for most topics.
Will be interesting to see what's there and not once the actual music torrents come up, should make it easier to search.
Hmm. This is actually not really something I need, I think; but
I consider anna's archive etc... as about as important as the
internet web archive. We need to preserve data, at the least
important data, also historic data - how the original websites
looked. Creativity of past generations. Same for games and books.
It may be only ~30 years for webpages to have emerged, but there
are also many young people who may not have experienced that since
they are too young to have experienced it. There is always a
generational change; our generation has the opportunity to store
more things.
Hmmm I don’t like this. There are sources for music with better quality out there and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution. I am worried about losing their ebook library. Quoting from the announcement: “Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved.“ They should have done this as a separate identity.
A lot of the ebook data has very few seeders, and it very much looks like they may all be AA. I assume it is a handful of people who this all relies on. I doubt there are many complete mirrors, if any. And even if there are, who of those are not only willing to seed but also run and redo all of the necessary infrastructure when shit hits the fan. As far as I can see, there is currently only one place left to actually contribute and upload material. The torrent music scene is a number of multitudes larger than that.
"and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution"
They are based in russia. And they currently do not work together so well with the west.
So it is imaginable, that if some people give Trump quite some money, to make Annas takedown part of some deal to lift sanctions after a ceasefire in Ukraine, but .. it does not seem like it. I rather suspect more effort in the west to block access to unwanted sites like this. My ISP in germany is already blocking it.
Your ISP is filtering DNS records. Easily fixed by changing DNS. It may even speed up your lookups, as most ISP DNS are slower than the large ones like quad1/8/9.
“In 2016, for example, the Moscow City Court (Mosgorsud) granted more than 700 requests to protect intellectual property.” https://www.group-ib.com/blog/torrents/
There are plenty of Russian music labels. Big book publishers? Not so much. Some sites explicitly ban content from the hosting country to try and avoid that. Not the case here.
Trump threatened the EU to tax Spotify (and others) just this week. So it doesn’t look like Trump would be happy to help Spotify out, though in exchange for money he’ll probably change his mind.
This is something really important, especially in the days when music and film vanishes from platforms one by one. I myself have three playlists with greyed out titles (titles are missing so there's no possibility for me to find out what was there).
That's why I divide music to the one that I want to have forever - I buy it on CDs - and dance music that I can live without one day
I really appreciate platforms that still show the titles and metadada after something is removed. Then at least I can go find it again to maintain my collection.
Tidal does this.
Not that we should, but it's technically feasible to have a music streaming server with the torrent as the backend, and selectively download the part of the torrent in respond to on-demand streaming request from the client.
The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus
I recently got into the whole homelab *arr stack for things like movies and tv and while I know options exist for music I just don’t see the need yet price-wise. Spotify is still just cheap enough for me to not care enough. We’ll see how long this holds.
That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.
I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.
I feel like Ek receives a disproportional amount of hate for this. You have all these American CEO's pouring their investments in the American war machine (Palantir, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc) and no one bats an eye.
Is it because this time it's going to a European company?
No, it's because Spotify is a consumer facing brand that people interact with daily and are aware of even if they don't use it. Also they're notorious for not paying artists well.
Practically nobody "likes" war. However, when facing adversaries like Putin who don't care for democracy, human life, human rights, agreements and contracts, who have no conviction beyond "might makes right", not ensuring clearly superior military capabilities ultimately means submitting to their plans of domination. Reflexively rejecting any kind of military investment is naïve and plays into the hands of the likes of Putin. It is no surprise that in the west, political parties and actors with proven ties to the Russian regime predominantly promote this faux-pacifist narrative, effectively inviting the fox into the chicken pen.
I'd rather download music and buy LP's, especially from smaller artists, than having a Spotify subscription. They get a much bigger cut and I get something tangible, if unpractical. The only ironic part is that a lot of small artists only print an extremely limited number of LP's, I don't understand why they don't let people purchase their stuff? Like maybe it's for the "limited feeling", but that just feels dumb as fuck.
I'm paying for youtube music, but on the side I started buying records in bandcamp directly from artists and putting them in my jellyfin library. I do use lidarr for some older tracks. I think the ecosystem is starting to look good enough, where you can have your own personal spotify.
The metadata alone is incredibly valuable for researchers. Having 186 million ISRCs catalogued with associated genre, tempo, and popularity data is a goldmine for music analysis that doesn't even require touching the audio files.
I've always found it interesting how streaming services have become the de facto music library of record, yet they can and do remove content at will. When Spotify pulled out of Russia, entire catalogs became inaccessible. Physical media and personal archives suddenly matter again in ways we thought were obsolete.
The copyright discussion is complex, but from a pure preservation standpoint, I'm glad someone is doing this work.
The bulk of today's customers has no idea how to pirate music, so they're not really a threat anymore. Music streaming has been rather convenient, you pretty much get the same content across all services. Video streaming platforms have, unfortunately become fragmented and, as of late, ad-ridden.
This is by far the largest music metadata database that is publicly available. For comparison, we have 256 million tracks, while others have 50-150 million. Our data is well-annotated: MusicBrainz has 5 million unique ISRCs, while our database has 186 million.
--------------
If they truly are on a mission to protect world's information from disappearing, they should work with MusicBrainz to get this data on it.
Alternatively, it would be amazing, if they built a MusicBrainz like service around it.
In either case, to make the data truly useful, they'd need to solve the problem on how to match the metadata to a fingerprint used to identify the music tracks, assuming that data is not part of the metadata they collected.
It would be reasonably trivial to set up a bot that mass-imports metadata from Spotify to MusicBrainz (note that MB rules do not allow this, community cleanup from a single user doing this with another source, years ago, is still ongoing).
The value that MusicBrainz adds is the community editor who spent a few hours going through YouTube videos and wayback machine social links to figure out that Fog (Wellington, NZ, punk/post-punk) and Fog (Auckland, NZ, Post-Punk) are different bands - even if they share a Spotify profile. The editor that hunted down and listened to 5 compilations that have mixed up a radio edit and an original mix of a track, to find out which is which, and separate them in MB and make notes. [these are made up examples]
That's not to imply that these two projects are 'competing', or that the ISRC figure comparison isn't useful and correct. But community database + scraped data is apples and oranges. And a mixed fruit bowl is wonderful.
I was wondering if MB had any rules on such things. I get the motivation, but I hope they'd be willing to work with some trusted editors to figure out if this data would be useful/could be imported without risking quality.
But MB is one of the best resources out there - precisely because of what you said - so I'm not complaining too much :)
> n either case, to make the data truly useful, they'd need to solve the problem on how to match the metadata to a fingerprint used to identify the music tracks
How is that a problem?
for each track in collection do extract_fingerprint
> We're curious about the peaks at whole minutes (particularly 2:00, 3:00, 4:00). If you know why this is, please let us know!
As a hobby video/audio editor, people will start with their track taking up a preset amount and fill up the time - even if it means having some dead space at the end.
The other alternative is algorithmically created music.
I've heard 2:00 is some kinda sweet spot for the Spotify algorithm and payouts? You get paid per play so you don't want to it too long, but if your track is much shorter than two minutes you get penalized or something. I know they've had to remove ambient tracks that were cut into 40 second clips as part of this.
So you might see a lot of anchoring just like YouTube videos kept stretching to almost exactly ten minutes?
The data analysis here is interesting. One thing that stood out to me is that black metal is the 6th most common musical genre for bands, right after rockabilly. I would never have expected that.
Moral and legal discussion aside, this is technically very impressive. I also wouldn’t be surprised if this somehow kickstarts open source music generative AI from China.
This is one of the greatest news I've ever heard for the digital preservation community. Just so many projects over the years could have used resources like this. Thank you for contributing to humankind!
Aamzingly, I don't even get this page. I just see the default "this page is not available" from my browser. I'm with Vodafone, and I wonder if it is legal to pretend a site doesn't exist without notifying me.
Pretty sure it's DNS level block. So just using private DNS would be enough, no need for full blown VPN. It's just that VPNs also usually use their own DNS instead of the ISPs.
I recommend NextDNS or similar to bypass those DNS blocks and also block ads at a very deep level that works ok mobile and even inside apps.
I have Spotify premium but the constant shuffle of content availability has meant I’ve stared routinely archiving my liked songs to avoid any rug pull. Zspotify and co still work a charm.
Does the Spotify backup contain any so far grayed out or unavailable songs on their list?
I'm a music archivist & preservationist, I've archived and found several formerly lost or on the verge of becoming lost albums, EPs, and Singles, and I've been wondering if the backup of Spotify so far, even with the available info, contain any taken down, region limited, or no longer available songs?
That included the artist location, allowing me to tag songs based on their country. I then created playlists such as "NERAS" Non-English Rock Artist Sample, where the one most popular song for a particular artist was chosen, and only when the country of origin was not English-speaking, and the genre was Rock. I like listening to music while working, but English lyrics distract me because I understand what they're saying.
After discovering music via the MySpace archive, I've since purchased 73 songs from 35 artists that I'd never heard of before digging into the data. I rebuilt my playlist on Spotify, but got greyed out tracks, and YouTube Music, but got "unavailable video". So I still prefer purchasing tracks via the iTunes Music Store, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and 7digital.
Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.
Meanwhile, if you're interested in the genre-by-country MySpace data, or have questions about the iTunes EPF, feel free to reach out and we can discuss your research.
> Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.
I would guess that combining these sources, along with info from MusicBrainz, would help quite a bit? Still, I'm rather surprised Spotify doesn't provide more information about artists.
I'd rather see them use AI to convert all the scanned scientific articles into proper PDF or other formats.
Also sort and classify the articles by binary size, vs page count, plot count, raster image count etc, in order to compress the outliers and detect when a raster image should have been a plot and convert it to vectorized images etc.
How compact can we get the collective human scientific corpus?
It seems to be that the metadata doesn't include the lyrics, probably because they are provided by Musixmatch. It would have been nice to have a database of lyrics linked to ISRCs. AFAIK Lrclib doesn't support downloading lyrics for a given ISRC.
great. Spotify just removes things all the time (things I actively listen to and work on for my jazz practices, one day just go "poof" because they didn't want to pay the record company anymore), and they are not as a company deserving of the role of "keeper of all the world's music". They don't give a shit and they'd vastly prefer we all listen to their AI generated royalty free crap and Joe Rogan.
Unrelated, but I just can't stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I'm a paying customer. Fuck you Spotify. You were supposed to be a convenient way to discover and listen to music. Now you are only convenient for listening to music, and absolutely terrible for any recommendations. This is sad really. Spotify had good recommendations. It's absolutely in a position where it can provide good recommendations — it has both a vast music library and a vast amount of data on user preferences. And it chooses to push procedural/ai-generated slop instead to earn more money. I thought that maybe buying $SPOT stock will make me more at peace with its greed, but it didn't work. Spotify fucking deserves to crash and burn because it sees paying customers as idiots who might not notice they are fed garbage. Fuck you Spotify, fuck you.
When they launched Discover Weekly thing, I used to add at least 1 track from it to my library - it was insanely good. Now it's all junk - not even close to what I listen to.
They also removed a lot of discovery features - Playlist Radio - for example. And they still do have some version of it on the backend, but you have to go through some weird mechanisms to trigger it - like play the last song in playlist, wait till it ends (or rewind) and you get the playlist radio. But it's also a crippled version of it - prefers playing the exact same popular songs for some reason.
Then they released this DJ thing, which is laughably bad. No Spotify, I don't want someone talking to me with useless information in between songs. Who though that was a good idea? Who actually uses that?
There hasn't been a change in Spotify in last 7 years or so that wasn't negative.
I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I'm still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it's specific to genres, but I haven't encountered any generated junk tracks.
It depends on the algorithm which often preferences "similarity" (for whatever definition of similarity is).
This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen through.
There's also obvious care and human creation there as well.
They have several "artists". Bertha Mae Lightning gets the better lyrics and artangements. Virgil Dillard gets simpler tunes and the occasional weird grammar/lyrics. And so on.
Really? How about asking google to "play bloomberg news on spotify" next time. Then see if you can remove the resulting chaos from your history so it won't start feeding you slop.
YouTube Music works pretty well for me. One great feature is that it includes not just a commercial music streaming catalog, but all user uploads of music on YouTube.
I had to chuck Youtube Music away when it was polluting my youtube playlists with stuff I was liking on youtube music. Me as a video viewer and me as a music listener are two completely different people.
and you can upload 100,000 of your own tracks to the service for your private use as well. It is a great service considering I am getting it as a side effect of youtube premium. Single handedly the last subscription I would cancel.
This is more frequent than you would assume. I’ve neither subscribed to Apple Music nor Spotify for this exact reason: I’m a millenial who would like to discover music.
Another extremely annoying effect is, being 40+, they only suggest music for my age. In “New” and “Trending”, I see Muse and Coldplay! I should make myself a fake ID just to discover new music, but that gets creepy very fast.
Why do you want a megacorp to tell you what to listen to!?? There are a million ways to do discovery where some enshitified corp isn’t incentivized to push something at you.
I think perhaps the assumption of the OP (I know mine was in the early days) was that "discovery" on Spotify would involve human tastemakers and some kind of dynamic aggregation of peer tastes that could lead to organic discovery of new music, no matter how niche or obscure.
As opposed to what it has now devolved into: the most basic of similarity matching always showing you the same few hundred songs, combined with increasingly numerous paid placements.
This is incredible. I once assembled a collection of 100,000 tracks for research on exploration of large music libraries. Essentially vector search. I was limited in storage and processing power to a single machine.
If I were to do it today, I could get so much farther with hyperscaler products and this dataset.
Both C#m and Db can be played on piano using only the black keys (skipping the 3rd note of the scale). This makes them easy keys for beginners. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but it could be related.
Anecdotally, I know a few vocalists that sound great in these keys and use them as a starting point
As a belated followup, I should observe that if you're playing "in C sharp minor" on the black keys, you're skipping notes 3, 6, and 7 of the scale... and those are the only notes that differ between a minor scale and a major scale, making the "minor" designation completely meaningless.
For electronic music, it's around the lowest bass root note that most systems can play well without a subwoofer. C pretty much requires a sub and things rarely go lower than that.
Electronic dance music is the biggest genre in the data. So then easy to play shouldn't matter. It's still an interesting question. I think playing Db is pretty nice on the piano even if it's not the easiest.
There is a sweet spot for the bass. Lower is better for deep bass, but too low and it stops being a recognizable note, and consumer speakers can't reproduce it. This effect exists though I'm not sure if it is the cause of the pattern here.
C# I don’t believe was/is a common tuning for most western instruments, classical or modern.
A digital piano can transpose things to make it “easier” to play.
Cursory google search says that a sitar is traditionally tuned to something useful for c#
I’m curious if C# is one of those notes that lines up nicely with whatever crappy consumer stereos/subs were capable of reasonable reproducing in the 90s as electronic music was taking off and it stuck around as a tribal knowledge for getting more “oomph” out of your tracks.
Increasing or decreasing? IMHO increasing would make more sense, as the most popular music is already mirrored in countless other places. It's the rare stuff that is most in need of preservation.
I wonder how much of the content there is AI-generated. Honestly, even as someone who was initially skeptical, I've found some of it to be rather good --- not knowing that it was AI-generated at first. Now if they could only reverse-engineer the prompt and only store the model, that would be an extremely efficient form of "compression".
Attracting the ire of the music industry seems like a huge, unnecessary risk. I wish they had performed this as some kind of other entity to try to keep the ebook archive protected from the fallout. I fear this will not end well.
This is not an issue in my view. I like the fact that I can download 100 MiB ultra-high resolution TIFF files of scans of photographs from the original negative from the Library of Congress and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC files of captures of 78 RPM records from the Internet Archive. In addition to maintaining completeness and quality of information, one of the main goals of preservation is to guard against further degradation and information loss. You should try to preserve the highest quality copies available (because they contain more information) and re-encoding (deliberate degradation) should only be used to create convenient access copies.
Inferior copies, in addition to being less informative, have the potential to misinform. Only the archivist will enjoy space savings. All the readers who might consult your library in the infinite future will bear the cost.
> ...(e.g. lossless FLAC). This inflates the file size...
This is entirely the wrong view. The file size of a raw capture compressed to FLAC should be thought of as the “true” or “correct” size. It is roughly the most efficient (balancing various trade-offs) representation of sampled audio data that we can presently achieve. In preservation we seek to preserve the item or signal itself and not simply what we might perceive thereof. This human-centric perception view is just wrong. There is data in film photographs which cannot be perceived visually yet can be of interest to researchers and be revealed with digital image analysis tools.
As an example of how much information celluloid can contain see: https://vimeo.com/89784677
(context: he is comparing a Blu-ray and a scan of a 35mm print)
I wonder if they'll explore other music services as well. As I understand it, Deezer, Qobuz, and Tidal can all get ripped easily enough. Although I'm not sure if they rate limit downloads past a certain point.
I'm a bit sad that they chose to focus on music rather than audiobooks. Creating an archive of audiobooks seem like it would be more aligned with their mission.
I just want to be able to backup my playlists. Maybe thats possible but last time I looked I could only find sites that wanted your login, not gonna happen.
There are a few tools that can export your spotify playlists into folders of audio files. That's what I used a few years ago for my initial spotify -> navidrome migration.
But they're not that good. They look for the songs on youtube, and the versions uploaded there are often modified (or just very low quality). And I've had some issues with metadata. I'd say about 5% of my songs had some issues, and 1% were completely off.
Once they release the actual torrents and not just the metadata, I'm assuming that new playlist export tools will soon show up, and they'll use these new torrents as source instead of youtube. They'll be a lot more reliable. I'd wait for that to happen. In fact I may end up re-exporting my old spotify playlist.
This is where ChatGPT shines. Just ask it to write you a script, it'll give you all the instructions.
I've used ChatGPT to write a whole bunch of playlist logic scripts (e.g. create a playlist that takes tracks from playlists A, B and C, but exclude tracks in playlist D.)
this is a really incredible effort. but, for the developers and analysts currently working with music metadata in a world where so much of music is being consumed thru streaming services that keep a tight hold on how their metadata and album art can be used, i am constantly yearning for a way to link streaming releases to public metadata sources that can be manipulated, embedded, and queried. i've done my best to build my own w/o a background in data science, but it's a hole that desperately needs filling to enable the new generation of scrobbling/music listening habit exploration.
So nice! That's an excellent extract and looks useful for benchmarking Meilisearch. I'll probably spend my Christmas holidays importing the tracks, albums, and artists into Meilisearch, while my CEO builds a beautiful front-end for it. I'll probably replace [the current music search demo](https://music.meilisearch.com) we have with this much higher-quality dataset!
That would also be a good fit for [the new delta-encoded posting lists I am working on](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pull/5985). Let's see how good it can get. My early benchmarks showed a 50% reduction in disk usage.
Thats huge, altho as a musician myself i am kinda scared of ai just taking all this data so they could make music better then me, i dunno maybe drop in there an anti ai trap zipbomb or somthing, that way it will work for normal users but not for ai
Uh, cool, I guess? I want to applaud that, but, first off, unless you are OpenAI or Facebook, it is not exactly plausibly easy to participate in the festivities. Even if I had spare 300 TB laying around, how the fuck do I download that?
But, more importantly, I cannot even say "good for you", because I don't actually think it is good for Anna's Archive. I wouldn't touch that thing, if I was them. Do we even have any solid alternatives for books, if Anna's Archive gets shot down, by the way? Don't recommend Amazon, please.
I am in no way saying that this is cheap but 300 TB will set you back a little less than $6k with tax. Very attainable for people other than OpenAI and Facebook. And it's not crazy at all to snag a server with enough bays to house all those.
For reference, considering you can purchase a 12-month Spotify Premium subscription via a $99 gift card at the moment, that same $6k could be used for 60 years of Spotify Premium.
For reference, cosidering the backup has 86 million music files, at an average of 3 minutes per file it would take you around 490 years to listen to all the tracks.
a client can selectively list and then stream individual files from a huge torrent. if you've ever watched illegal movies/shows on those random domain websites, you're likely streaming it from a torrent on the backend somewhere.
it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see some docker images pop up in a few days to do exactly this as a sort of "quasi-self-hosted jellyfin". Where a person host a thin client on a machine that then fetches the data from the torrent, then allows the user to "select" their library. A user can just select "Top hits from the 80s" and it'll grab those files from the torrent, then stream or back them up.
I don't really see why it wouldn't, from an end user perspective, be any different than a self hosted jellyfin or plexamp.
Anna's archive mirrors z-lib and libgen, so those are the main alternatives. But it's unlikely anna's archive would go down so easily, they take a lot of precautions.
>Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
There is a ton of good bands with under 10k or even 1k monthly listeners.
Currently it says they have released metadata and album art. Is archiving and sharing the textual track metadata alone (no images, no audio) legal in the US, or Europe? By what basis is it legal or illegal?
1. You are all probably talking past each other - I expect the original question of legality was about criminal, and not civil, law.
2. I'm sure they did not view or sign the TOS to access this. You can't be bound to a contract you never view or intentionally assent to. At least in most countries/places.
For example, in the US I can show you tons of cases in just about every state and federal court where the court decided the TOS doesn't apply because it was never viewed or assented to.
(Ironically it works both ways, so if the contract provides you any guarantees, you can't take advantage of them to sue for breach if yuo never assented)
It's different if you can prove that they knew there was a TOS they would be bound by and just never bothered to look at the terms.
That is very hard to prove, and it does not suffice to prove that everybody has a TOS these days or whatever. You have to prove actual knowledge of a TOS by these particular defendants.
I use the US because it tends to be on the forefront of maximal browserwrap enforcement, so if it's not going to be enforced there, it's usually not going to be enforced anywhere
Monopoly is not a nice thing. Maybe it is convenient, but not nice.
People that gives money to artists are the ones going to concerts and buying music directly to artists. Spotify gives cents to artists, incetivizing awful behaviour (AI music, aggressive marketing, low effort art...).
Some people's urges to destroy all traces of human civilisation astonish me. What do you think Spotify is going to do with all its music when it ceases to exist in however many years? No, we must collectively feed Daniel Ek the Hungry.
I envision an army of lawyers and cyber security companies being
prepared to unleash a scorched earth campaign that book publishers
might want to be part of as well.
At the end it may take down more than just this publication but most
others as well.
Interesting if that is considered to be copyrightable. Any white noise track is perceptually indistinguishable from another, but none have the exact same sequence of samples except by chance, or if the noise generator happens to be deterministic as a function of time.
I find it so odd that people then to streaming services for stuff like this. I have a dedicated white noise machine, and when I travel, I use the white noise (bright noise actually) built into the iPhone.
Relying on an external hosted service would never cross my mind, and surely wouldn’t be something I go to on a daily basis.
You might find it interesting that there's an entire genre of youtube video that's designed to just be chucked one by one into slideshows for elementary school teachers to use as their lesson plan. Including videos that are just "2 minute timer for kids!"
I want to time-travel back to 2000 like Old Biff with the sports almanac so I can tell Shawn Fanning to use the "it's for historical preservation" defense.
I want to peek in that metadata collection to see if it could be used to identify the AI slop that's infecting Spotify.
If you could identify a track supposedly by artist X was actually AI slop not created by artist X, you could use that information to skip tracks on (web) music players, for example.
It would be interesting to find out how that has changed with the growth of the music industry over the years. I suspect that many of these <1000 streamed could be artificially generated for monetary purposes but I'm not entirely sure. That being said, there is a lot of good music with less than 1000 streams. I've been looking myslef and I've definitely found some hidden gems.
I really don't understand how focusing on source quality files is supposed to be a "major issue" with the music preservation community. It's bizarre for them to talk about these being barriers for creating a "full archive of all music that humanity has ever produced" have and their answer be scraping Spotify to end up with a music library comprised of many AI and bulk produced songs at 75/160kbps.
the top 10,000 songs seem to be 99.9% top-40 corporate pop, which suprised me. thought a list that broad would pick up more that was outside the maintream ...
Holy crap. This is going to trigger a five-alarm fire at Spotify Engineering. This has got to be among the largest proprietary datasets ever unintentionally publicized by a company.
I mean... not really? Not much music is Spotify exclusive (at least from the 99.6% of what people listen to mentioned in the article), and from friends in the industry I can guarantee you all major content platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a large chunk of YouTube) have already been completely copied without a business agreement with the rightsholders by AI startups and big-name players.
All torrent clients must necessarily support partial downloads because of the nature of torrents. The files are split into pieces which are downloaded and then assembled by the torrent client.
Looking at the analysis, I'm totally surprised opera and psytrance are so prolific.
Psy-trance... I thought it was the same as any other electronic genres, but do people get high and just start shoveling psy-trance tracks out or something?
Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists?
I mean, I'm sure there's some misclassification, but chamber music is basically a couple people with any sort of music training on classical instruments so that doesn't surprise me nearly as much... I can easily imagine there being _lots_ of those, and you might come up with a different artist name for each unique set of people you collaborate with.
Former classical singer here. Only theory I can come up with is that opera tends to have large casts where all the singers are credited individually which would inflate the absolute numbers of "artists" relative to other generes. I still struggle to imagine this accounting for bringing such a niche genera to the top here.
> Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists?
My guess is just the same opera performed by a ton of different orchestras, and perhaps the same orchestra for different recordings, times however many operas there are.
I was suspicious of this too. I don't think "genres" table is correct.
On Spotify, Blue Öyster Cult are listed as: ['album rock', 'classic rock', 'glam metal', 'hard rock', 'progressive rock', 'rock']
In the archive, they are just coming up as ['classic rock', 'hard rock']
Grimes: ['art pop', 'canadian electropop', 'grave wave', 'indietronica', 'metropopolis', 'neo-synthpop']
In the archive: ['art pop']
lol. Where is all this anti-psytrance hate coming from?
Are you people actually that childish that you don't understand the concept of taste, and that everyones' is different? People who have like different music than you aren't stupid. Electronic musicians aren't bad musicians.
You know that nice feeling you get when you listen to music from your preferred composer/artist/genre? Other people feel exactly the same, but with different kinds of music. Some people even love the thing that you hate! wow! Who knew? Except for anybody above the age of 5.
TLDR; just because you dont like Indian food, doesn't make Indian food bad. It's the same for music or other things that are dependent on taste.
In fact, I have a fairly sizeable collection of trance music on my NAS, mainly more mainstream stuff, but some is psytrance.
It's unreasonable to assume psytrance would organically occupy such a large portion of top Spotify songs.
TLDR; just because I think large number of Spotify psytrance songs are AI generated, doesn't mean I hate psytrance. Only childish people would think that.
yo, this is insane!! why would anyone do that? I think it is for AI music generation models, like training them. Maybe ai labs people did it?? yeah that is likely
im thinking about the consolidation around minute marks. its at every minute mark below 10 minutes, albeit dropping precipitously after 4 minutes. i have 2 guesses. guess one is that people like even numbers so if a track was already going to be within so many seconds of exactly a minute mark that they are more likely to push it to that number. with people caring less above 4 minutes because you are already making a long song, i could imagine caring less at that point. but my second guess is that along with the vast increase of ai slop posted to spotify both by spotify themselves and by other people, some of the programs they use probably fix on minute increments. like how a lot of ai videos are 10 seconds long or a series of 10 second videos. just a guess, however. i have no information or facts to back this up
I’m hugely disappointed in Anna’s archive. As much as they believed they were doing this for good, they have now allowed bad faith actors to obtain all music for AI gen. This is just horrific for all artists out there who are fighting against so many issues that impact their creativity and sustainability. Why not just digest the data and not allow the music out there. As usual artists get fucked over.
the metadata alone is a staggering couple hundred gb, however it contains quite handy information to play with. consider the following:
> /audio-features/{id} "Get audio feature information for a single track identified by its unique Spotify ID."
this combined with track metadata can finally allow those motivated enough to create their own personalized shuffle. potentially better than the slop we get nowadays. no generative ai required*.
When I left my apartment back in 2018, I was switching the Comcast account over to my housemate who was staying on there. In doing so I discovered I had a myname2342@comcast.com email account. The UI showed something like 8,000 unread emails. Bemused, I opened it to see what kind of spam it had accumulated. None at all! It was just under 8,000 DMCA / torrent warning emails from Comcast itself. "We know you torrented The.Pokemon.Movie.2001.h264.mkv, you better stop that!"
A full year of these emails and nothing more than that ever happened.
(if you're wondering how I hit 8000 torrents, the answer is individual album torrents)
I have absolutely no idea why you’re being downvoted. This feels like exactly the sort of project that would be backed by the current Russian administration, given it serves to damage and destabilise businesses in countries that are currently hostile to Russia. — it’s not even a controversial take to say so.
Was Obama funding Aaron Swartz's efforts to scrape JSTOR?
Some people have the personality trait of loving to build collections or archives. Either for idealistic reasons (knowledge deserves to be free) or just because it's fun.
When that personality trait intersects with technical ability, we get projects such as the Internet Archive, Archive Team, Library Genesis, etc. There is no reason to assume state sponsorship, and 2/3 of those definitely aren't state sponsored.
> Why would you want to destroy your enemies' industries, is what you're asking?
Do you have any evidence that pirating is destroying industries? My guess is I can find the majority of this release by anna's archive on some combination of the pirate bay and the soulseek, or private music trackers. And yet, Spotify is still a thriving company, as is the entire music industry as a whole. There's even room for competing streaming services like Tidal and Youtube Music.
Then why would Anna's Archive also release archives of some of the largest Chinese publishers? Surely Putin wouldn't want to destroy China's industries.
The people I know who go through the trouble of pirating and downloading vast libraries of music are all musicians themselves, or at the very least total music nerds. They don’t want to lose access to their stuff, plus if they ever need to import audio into a DAW, DRM is a no-go. They are the same people who spend large amounts of money on vinyls, and support smaller independent artists through concerts, merch and (back in the day) CDs.
It used to be more mixed, but today, piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.
> piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but I find that nowadays the process of buying high-quality, DRM-free MP3 music is as simple and straightforward as it can be: you purchase the files (on Bandcamp, Amazon, Apple Music, etc.), download them legally, and then physically own them forever.
By the way, when purchasing through Bandcamp, 80+% goes to the artist (https://bandcamp.com/fair_trade_music_policy). So not only do you own the music, but you also make sure the artist is properly paid for their work.
Nope, you are just more informed than me, thanks for the correction. I was extrapolating based on general trends in all forms of media (like games and movies too). It would be interesting to know what ratio of music can be acquired DRM free today.
It's both. Musicians and music nerds buy CDs and LPs and tapes and Bandcamp files and they "pirate" music both because they care about ownership and quality and rare or substantially different editions of records that aren't available legally, and because they've seen the sausage factory from the inside and know that "stealing" $0.02 from an artist who's starving like them anyway isn't really that far up on the list of heinous crimes. Buy the shirt, download the album. No one cares.
Music piracy is already a thing, not to mention you don't even need to torrent nowadays when music is available for free on YouTube. Those who don't want to pay already don't pay so nothing changes there.
The value of Spotify is the convenience, and this collection does not change that in any way. Your argument would apply if someone were to make a Spotify clone with the same UX using this data.
At least pirates provide some value from curation usually. In this case the leak is just all of Spotify. It makes it really easy for a competitor to just duplicate the Spotify service without paying licensing fees. Tbd what happens.
As soon as a competitor duplicates Spotify they’ll pay licensing fees or they’ll be pretty quickly shut down. You don’t get a free pass to stream music to people just because you happen to have the file.
Because it's not stealing. Stealing is a problem because it deprives the original owner of the item - whether the thief subsequently uses the item or not doesn't change that.
This doesn't apply to dematerialized content: the original copy still exists. The only negative impact occurs if someone decides to actually use the pirated copy in place of buying a licensed one.
The mere existence of this new pirate copy being around doesn't automatically imply that, especially if other, more convenient sources are available.
Okay, call it copyright infringement then if you want to be a stickler on definitions. It's still wrong and existing instances of it doesn't make it justifiable to do.
The idea is that the streamers and major labels cannot be trusted to keep this available for future generations, so if we want to preserve our shared culture we should take matters into our own hands.
I think the negatives for artists are minimal while the benefits of preserving a annotated snapshot of contemporary music for future generations is very valuable.
Spotify can shut down any day. Even if it survives, it's removing content all the time. How are future generations supposed to study and listen to music if it is lost? Imho, someone has to do it.
> What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.
My spotify wrapped says I listened for 50,000 minutes this year. Assuming 2 minutes per song, that's 25,000 streams. I paid them $110, aka $0.004/stream. Assuming I'm a typical user, they obviously could not afford to pay any more than that per stream.
I googled "spotify pay per listen" and the first result is a reddit comment saying "The average payout on Spotify is only $0.004 per stream." The google AI overview says "Spotify [..] pays artists a fraction of a cent, typically $0.003 to $0.005 per stream". So I'll assume it's something in that ballpark.
So it seems like Spotify's payouts are completely reasonable, given their pricing. Is my logic wrong somewhere?
That’s a fun math. I just checked mine: 96000 minutes. 2 minutes per song is way too generous as an assumption, for me everything seems to be > 3 minutes so ~20000 streams.
I’m paying for a family account (that’s around 250/year) and there are 5 people on it so my usage is 1/5th of that (50/year)
So that’s 0.0025€ per stream. I don’t think your assumption is unreasonable.
In most cases, they couldn't make that decision even if they wanted to. Only independent artists and those that are so large as to have enough sway (Niel Young for example) would be able to. The vast majority of artists you probably listen to don't actually own the rights to their own music.
So let the rights holders make the decision? They would never. Music rights exist for them to extract profit above all else. They don't care about preserving culture or legacy. Which is why it's important that somebody does.
Why is this stealing? You can already listen to everything that's on Spotify with a free account. You are free to also record the audio while it's playing. I suppose grabbing the actual file should't matter? Or is this about releasing? And robbing people of plays they would otherwise get through Spotify?
If you listen to something on Spotify with a free account the artists still get paid. This isn't a case where you're ripping off so mega-corp. You're ripping off thousands of artists from major label ones to tiny indies. Take the metadata and build something cool. Stealing the files and releasing them is something else entirely.
You can record what you play from Spotify and you are already free to play the record again and again and again without the artist being paid.
Most people do not because they find it less convenient than paying 20bucks a month or whatever is the current price in 2025 but that doesn't change the reality.
For most people the appeal of Spotify is not the music itself but the playlists that are shared thanks to its ubiquity. This is the reason other services struggle to make a dent even if they have better quality, UI and algos.
Spotify started by disrupting the market using pirated music by the way so you are pretty much endorsing and encouraging piracy when "paying" your favorite artists through Spotify.
While I wouldn't call this scummy I do agree with your sentiment. It is technically stealing and those copyrights should be respected.
Full disclosure, I am a career musician AND have been known to pirate material. That said, I think this is a valuable archive to build. There are a lot of recordings that will not endure without some kind of archiving. So while it's not a perfect solution, I do think it has an important role to play in preservation for future generations.
Perhaps it's best to have a light barrier to entry. Something like "Yes, you can listen to these records, but it should be in the spirit of requesting the material for review, and not just as a no-pay alternative to listening on Spotify." Give it just enough friction where people would rather pay the $12/month to use a streaming service.
Also, it's not like streaming services are a lucrative source of income for most artists. I expect the small amount of revenue lost to listeners of Anna's Archive are just (fractions of) a penny in the bucket of any income that a serious artist would stand to make.
It is technically not. Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not. You can’t steal a copyright (aside from something like breaking into your stuff and stealing the proof that you hold the copyright), and then a song is downloaded the original copyright holder still have copy.
Calling piracy theft was MPAA/RIAA propaganda. Now people say that piracy is theft without ever even questioning it, so it was quite successful.
See my other comment. Identity theft is the bank being defrauded and passing the problem onto you. They are the victim, not you and it is their money that’s gone, not yours.
IP theft is more like espionage and possibly lost hypothetical revenue. Again, it isn’t larceny, burglary, etc. You still have the knowledge, it’s just that so does the perpetrator.
Moreover discussions of IP gets into whether it even makes sense to be able to patent algorithms which are at their core just mathematics. So before you can talk about stealing the quadratic formula you need to prove that the quadratic formula is something that can be property.
You may not be stealing the actual content, more so “making a copy”, but in doing that you’re taking away money the artist would have earned if you bought their album or streamed it on Spotify (admittedly that’a a very small amount for the artist but that’s another thing)
And if I stole something physical you had for sale, you wouldn’t make the money, so the end result is effectively the same.
The “if you bought their album” is the non-trivial part of that sentence. A pirate is not necessarily going to fork over $20 for an album if they couldn’t pirate. Chances are they will simply not buy the album. In either case the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 (6% to the artist the rest to the studio and distributors). So the result is really not the same because the artist and the pirate can both have the album in different ways and in both cases the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 unlike a physical good which cannot be cloned.
What this really is exposing is that most art is not worth the same. A Taylor Swift album is not worth the same on the open market as a Joe Exotic album. Pricing both at say $20 is artificial. Realistically most music has near zero actual value, hence why if you are a B tier or lower artist you won’t make much compared to an A tier artist on platforms like Spotify or YouTube which pay per listen/watch.
Can you post your social security number and other personal info here then? You will still have it afterwards!
Oh also, I don't see why I should ever pay for trains or movie tickets if there are seats available. I can just walk in! The event will happen anyway. Its not stealing.
Everyone should just download all art, music and literature for free. Musicians, artists and writers can all make money some other way while I enjoy the works of their efforts.
What the music/movie industry was claiming in court was not theft. There is no statute that identifies piracy as theft. They were claiming copyright violation and wanted to collect damages for lost revenue.
You are bringing up “identity theft” which is also not theft. If you post your PII here and I use it to open a credit card in your name and then spend a bunch of the money using that card on buying goods and services, you are not the victim. What I do in that case is defraud the bank. They are the ones who are the actual victim and in the ideal world they would be the ones working with the authorities to get their money back.
Of course they would rather not do that so they invented a crime called identity theft and convinced everyone that it is ok for them to make you the victim. They make your life hell since they can’t find the actual criminal while you spend thousands of dollars trying to prove that you don’t owe thousands of dollars. But in reality you were not any part of the fraud. It is on the bank to secure their system enough to prevent this. But they have big time lawyer money and you don’t so here you are.
Ageee with you, this release is obviously a scummy thing to do.
Same as if someone released every book on Kindle for free. There are rules. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.
Not to mention the organization is openly trying to profit from this data by selling it to big tech orgs for AI training! None of the artists consented to that, I am sure, to say nothing if Spotify's interests.
Everyone should just download all art, music and literature for free. Musicians, artists and writers can all make money some other way while I enjoy the works of their efforts.
Many artists already work this way. They are on Spotify et al. for reach not because it does anything meaningful for them financially. It’s not like your subscription fee is distributed fairly to the artists you listen to anyway[0].
To the extent they make money at all, it’s from touring, and selling physical media and merch.
The world under Spotify is about as financially bad for most artists as if everyone was pirating away.
If we all quit Spotify, pirated everything, and spent the money we saved buying things from the artists we were enjoying the most (from their own sites, Bandcamp, or at concerts), the artists and musicians would be much better off.
[0] Unless you only listen to the big stars who end up getting most of the payouts.
Yuck. Just to make it easier to train slop machines. The point of art is not to have completionist archives of EVERYthing that’s ever been made! Let it die. Death is the most natural part of life. Art is about the human experience, not “for researchers”.
The point is human connection. Art is a living reflection and record of human experience.
Art will persevere- the kinds of folks who prioritize what they like based on popularity were never the supporters artists (contrast with craftspeople trying to make a buck) counted on in the first place. Enjoy your derivative slop - we’ll continue on our imperfect, messy, individual, human artistic lives.
I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?
do you mean that researchers should be disallowed from accessing art?
I do not see how research interferes with all the benefits you prioritise. Can't you continue to enjoy those benefits?
Many people think 'real' music has electric guitars. I think they're wrong, but why argue with them? I think it's fine if you do not like music made from music, but that ship sailed last century. One detail you may be missing is that there are imperfect messy individual artistic humans who make music from music too. Computers are no more an obstacle to human connection through music than electric guitars are.
> I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?
Don't talk to people like here, please. It's passive aggressive and unproductive. GP's comment was fine, if not a bit impassioned, regardless if you agree with it.
This is insane.
I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. Or if the major record labels already license their entire catalogs for training purposes cheaply enough, so this really is just solely intended as a preservation effort?
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
> Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff.
The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
They have a page directly addressed to AI companies, offering them "enterprise-level" access to their complete archives in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. AI may not be their original/primary motivation but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing.
You go where the money is. Infra isn’t free. Churches pass the plate every Sunday. Perhaps one day we’ll exist in a more optimal socioeconomic system; until then, you do what you have to do to accomplish your goals (in this context, archivists and digital preservation).
> Infra isn’t free.
There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
You have been able to buy DRM free digital music from all of the record labels since 2009 from Apple and other stores.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.
And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.
Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?
There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.
Quboz, bandcamp, etc.
Bandcamp is still my go to for owning music. Nice platform, just works.
I still buy DRM free music from Amazon.
You've been able to buy DRM free digital music since the 1980s.
Technically not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
I think OP was referring to CDs, which AFAIK don't have DRM.
My link is to the CD DRM!
This is rather misleading. Standard CDs as sold had (and have) no DRM.
The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.
Unless the CD comes with a root kit that interferes with that copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
> DRM free digital music from all of the record labels
Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?
Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.
https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/
While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format
ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011. https://macosforge.github.io/alac/
Wow. How did I miss that!!!
The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.
A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.
Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?
If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.
Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
I don’t know about Mountain Fever, but for anything I haven’t been able to find on Bandcamp, I’ve been able to find on Qobuz.
Piracy went down quite a bit since that is possible.
they made cd singles and single song purchases long before streaming
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
It's not the bits that are copyrighted, it's the performance and the creative work.
Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
> Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
Value is subjective. Ownership is not. You're attempting to perform a sleight of hand by conflating the two.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money. But I have a right to expect that e.g. code I develop in my toolkit will remain my own to provide me an income.
„Shared delusion“ - just another term for „social contract“?
Sort of? The contract doesn't mention that "value" and "price" are just as often negatively correlated as positively so, though, and claims the opposite (always positive correlation), hence where the shared delusion comes in.
> Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born
This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.
Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Thanks for the tip.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
Currency (or IOU's, handshakes, pieces of green paper, bits on a disc, etc) is just an abstraction allows one to have choice.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
There are several labs and researchers with ideas on how to do this and published books on the subject (https://www.sharing-thebook.com/).
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
This would work on niche segments and not for the masses. Look up YouTube subscribers to Pateon ratio.
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.
If we're purely talking about music then almost everything is on YouTube, which has a subscription cost of $0/mo.
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”
Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.
> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
> I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video
Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.
My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)
Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
The worldwide median internet download bandwidth is about 100 Mbps, which is far enough for HD or bluray video. The technical barrier can be as low as 'click to search, click to download' in some user-friendly BT clients. That being said, the price of these subscriptions is a problem that actually needs to be solved.
Anyone is free to release under free use in our current system. You already can live with the benefits of no IP law by just limiting yourself to those people that chose to to release this way.
I agree completely. Parasites with money like to keep open the legal loopholes for their clever wheeze.
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.
I am. Copyright is fucking cancer and is one of the worst things if not the worst things that exists to make creating new things harder.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
I pay artists directly, and know they receive almost nothing from Spotify and other Big Tech platforms, ymmv. Artists good, big business bad.
Everyone is doing it, who Cates anymore. Genie's out of the bottle, we could've tried to solve this for decades and yet we didn't so now we reap what we sowed. Happens, move on.
Data are basically free. Infra to store and transfer data is not.
Do you have evidence they are profiting? I'm genuinely curious how these kinds of archives sustain themselves.
I don’t think any of them are breaking even when you consider the maintenance costs, I just thought it was kind of funny considering the nature of the line of work they are in.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
They take donations.
Just to nitpick, that doesn't imply profit. They could be breaking even (and probably are working at a loss).
I admit the irony, but also funny reminder that Spotify started with a pirated catalogue back on the day.
You go where the money is.
That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
Or they know that those parties are going to hammer their servers no matter what so they will at least try and get some money out of it.
That made me chuckle, Enterprise Level Access. I mean as ai company, that’s incredibly cheap and instead of torrenting something, why get it. That price is just a fraction of a engineers salary.
But then you have a money trail connecting the company unambiguously to copyright violations on a scale that is arguably larger than Napster.
I mean Facebook and Anthropic both torrented LibGen in its entirety.
I believe they're largely targeting foreign companies who don't care much about US copyright law.
Yeah,how devstating it would be for Anna's Archive to be found skirting copyright laws. Their reputation may never recover.
\s
He meant the AI companies
I mean, the same comment applies mutatis mutandis.
I think there is a big legal difference between helping preserve books and papers with little regard for copyrights, to then turn around and selling access to large companies.
So either these folks, who are admittedly living targets of all the world's copyright lawyers, have means to receive tens of thousands of USD anonymously and stealthily,
or they are totally immune to deanon / getting tracked down,
or they are stupid enough to allow their greed to become their downfall,
or this legend about underground warriors of light fighting against evil copyrighters is utter bullshit.
> I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
Who cares, today is pretty easy to be part of a botnet. Having a slightly outdated lightbulb qualifies, so I'd not bother.
Having an IoT device with security vulnerabilities does not automatically make you vulnerable to botnets because it’s behind your router’s NAT under normal conditions.
Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices.
The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection
Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
Nope, many IoT devices open ports via UPnP. The biggest botnets are composed of (among other things) smart plugs, baby monitors, doorbells, IP cameras...
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect.
And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
I think the people seeding these are also ideologs and so would be interested in also supporting the obscure stuff, maybe more than the popular. There is no way any casual listeners would go to the quite substantial trouble of using these archives.
Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
It's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close.
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
> Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
Until they decide to silence the artist you want to listen to because emperor god trump decides to unperson them.
Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
>I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience
Spotify isn't "convenient" if you want to control and understand the media and software in your life. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/spotify
> Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
Thankfully Spotify isn't primarily a U.S company.
Godwins Law recreated, the new version is Trump.
Barely all. I have so many songs in my playlist that has randomly become unavailable. It's quite frustrating to be honest.
It's absolutely not all, I'm an extremely casual listener, not 'into' music or anything, and I have plenty in a playlist that have disappeared (mostly I don't even know what they are, it's just greyed out with no information) for whatever reason. And that's just the stuff that was there at some point that I liked.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Spotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
how are some tracks more profitable to spotify than others?
They were caught flooding their own playlists with specially for them produced Garbage Music for which they don't have to pay royalties
https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-...
> There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie
Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
They’re doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for AI companies.
> They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then.
Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain.
And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
[flagged]
They know about AI companies and don't mind AI companies, but they're not doing it because AI companies.
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.
What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work.
For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/
For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/
This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.
Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
I get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.
Under the current system people can release everything they want as free use.
How much media that the average person choses to consume is this 'free use' media? How much is media that artists chose to make money from?
This doesn't do much for the argument that artists only do art for money. Everyone knows what happens to free use art, same as what happens to FOSS: corpos bundle it up and sell it back to people.
By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.
Great. So you already have a firehose of free art, no need/benefit to change copyright for those that want to release that way then.
fwiw, the vast majority of my working musician friends (who do also hold day jobs) would rather you pirate their music than stream it on spotify. they make basically all of their income from music via touring, streaming income might pay for a coffee or two a month.
> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
I challenge you to ask 10 creative people in your life if they would stop doing whatever it is they do if they had a billion dollars.
The desire to create something does not seem like an immutable characteristic.
Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?
> Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?
No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?
That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
Yes, as long as they have enough to survive, people generally have some free time. I know someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and they make music as a hobby. Obviously, if you have to work 16 hours a day to survive they wouldn't do it – or at least they wouldn't have the capacity to share it.
"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
Flippant response: If it's ok for Meta for commercial use, why not for researchers for legitimate research work?
More serious response: research is explicitly included in fair use protections in US copyright law. News organizations regularly use leaked / stolen copyrighted material in investigative journalism.
Because the laws are there to protect people with money from people who don't have money.
A little off topic, but I remain naively hopeful that the horror you describe will keep Spotify from going down the same road Netflix did once content owners decided to get into the streaming business themselves, so that streaming a movie today requires you to "change the channel" to whichever service offers that movie.
Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10/month subscription?
The metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably
Self-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don't give a damn is telling.
Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.
Especially since they scraped Spotify's popularity rating as well
I can't think of many situations where that would be particularly valuable, considering it favours recent plays and the cutoff date is already almost half a year old.
Helps train an algorithm to figure out which music is popular, as a training signal
If that's all the issues there are with the dataset, it is probably far and away the best dataset any researcher has ever used.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?
I am not, how did they solve that?
> this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners
I can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.
I dunno if they publish like a 10 TB torrent of the most popular music I can see people making their own music services. A 10 TB hard disk is easily affordable, and that's about 3 million songs which is way more than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, even if you reduce that by 100x to account for taste.
It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...
I would expect more data to make ai music generation better
The problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators.
An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.
In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.
When they say "worse" they do mean the AI will get better which will be worse because they are ideologically opposed to AI.
I'm not ideologically opposed to AI. The problem will get worse because while the quality of the music will improve, it will still be bad and there will also be a lot more of it.
We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing.
If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.
>The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumer
it's an archive to defend against Spotify going away. Remember when Netflix had everything, and then that eroded and now you can only rely on stuff that Netflix produced itself?
the average consumer will flock when Spotify ultimately enshitifies
Netflix didn't lose content by choice. Actual right holders decided to pull their content and create rival services.
Has nothing to do with perceived enshittification by Netflix (even though they have enshittification too).
Spotify is under the same threat: they have no content that they own. Everything is licensed.
Dude, as of now Netflix cancelled 263 shows[0], I have no idea where this idea of not having a choice is coming from.
[0]: https://simkl.com/5743957/list/59981/cancelled-tv-shows-netf...
Spotify is banking on AI music which is enough to tell you everything you need to know about the company, their C-suite and their opinion on music.
The bit in the blog post about the amount of music uploaded yearly to Spotify was shocking.
I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
> but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
There is. And most people would not even recognize a lot of AI music without multiple listens and digging through things like "is there any online presence (which can also be easily spoofed)".
I've fallen into the trap myself with some (pretty generic) blues music
> Spotify is banking on AI music
Are they?
Yes, they actively promote playlists with AI music to corner the "chill work" music without having to pay anything to musicians.
Ah yes. The reason is because all the money is in the chill music. And not in the fact that the most formulaic genres get flooded with easily generated music ("chill work" music especially doesn't even need sophisticated AI, a random number generator would work).
And that's before we ask the question of how to identify AI-generated music (no one asks that question, but everyone wants it removed).
But, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.
> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
I thought they started producing their own podcasts. Can't bring in much though.
260+ million songs they don't own vs a dozen or so podcasts
They also have fake artists they put on playlists :P
Yes, but it's still the required correction to your claim. I actually don't know how many podcasts are using their publishing platform. I imagine it's considerably more than a dozen.
They want to own something but it's always going to be a drop in the ocean. They have a small new music label thing called RADAR but I imagine the failure rate on that is very high. They need to buy a label if they want to meaningfully change this. Just like Amazon now owns MGM and Netflix maybe getting Warner Bros. Presumably they can't afford to do this, and I don't think that integration would work as well in the music industry.
There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of popular movies on their streaming service.
For their mail service they did
This, indeed, has mostly implications for ML, training, etc. As otherwise the whole catalog is available to partners, but costs a lot. So Anna did indeed liberate the content, but I'm definitely not switching off my Spotify subscription, even though, in my personal taste, neither quality, nor UI does match Apple Music. It is still useful to have s.o. serve the content for you.
>The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Curious why not? Assuming you only used the metadata. I think they would be considered raw facts and not copyrightable.
Just cite facebook getting busted training its AI on torrents proven to contain unlicensed material lol
>> But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Didn't Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They're too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.
They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook annual revenue is about it twice that of the entire global recording industry. The strategy these companies took was probably correct but that calculation included the high risk of ultimately having to pay out down the line. Don’t mistake their current resistance to paying for an internal belief they never will have to.
> They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook [...]
I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement.
First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt.
Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
Anthropic had to pay $1.5 billion recently so you're incorrect. I'm sure more of such cases will come up against big tech too.
It's obviously more profitable to pay the fine than to not do the illegal thing in the first place, so I am correct.
DRM aside, Spotify clearly should have logic that throttles your account based on requests (only so many minutes in a day..), making it entirely impractical to download the entirety of it unless you have millions of accounts.
>unless you have millions of accounts.
Challenge accepted…
This is probably how they did it, over time, was use a few thousand accounts and queued up all the things, and download everything over the course of a year.
Notably 160kbit is the free-tier bitrate, so they presumably used unpaid accounts.
Just like with anything digital you (and Spotify) are fully at the mercy of the rights holders. When (not if) they pull their stuff, or replace their stuff, or change their stuff, you can never get the original back unless you preserve it.
Largest example: a lot of Russian music is not available on Spotify because of the Russia-Ukrane war, and Spotify pulling out of Russia. So they don't have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.
>I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
What's stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker?
Slow, but effective.
> Slow, but effective.
I wouldn't call this very effective. It would take an impractically long amount of time to capture a meaningful fraction of the collection and quality would suffer greatly.
Even if you plug the audio output into the input you would still be taking a quality loss by passing the audio through a DAC and then an ADC. Maybe if the quality of your hardware is good enough it wouldn't matter, but then you would be limited to only ripping 24 hours of audio per day...
You don't have to pass it through a DAC. There's no equivalent of HDCP for protecting digital audio end to end. Crudely, you could capture S/PDIF but really, skip that and just output to a virtual audio device for recording. No DAC in the path either way.
But yes, it is inconvenient and slow.
They recently started offering lossless, could you get down to the equivalent of 320kbps?
I grew up on sites like Suprnova, and quickly found I could not discern the difference between 320 mp3s and lossless.
Even now, I only seem to notice if I use a very high end pair of headphones, and mostly with electronic music that has a lot of soft parts with sounds that are in the low or high end of the spectrum.
Bro. Who cares. Ive got bunch of songs like this. The loss makes it more nostalgic
Audio fingerprinting?
>Audio fingerprinting?
Bought a spotify card with cash, email was registered on public wifi.
Who cares? :-)
They'd probably do a shit job of capturing it?
> I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
Do they have DRM at all? Youtube and Pandora don't.
Spotify has DRM, and you can find open-source reimplementations of it on github.
Their native clients use a weak hand-rolled DRM scheme (which is where the ogg vorbis files come from), whereas the web player uses Widevine with AAC.
Yes they do use DRM. I know they are using Widevine on the web player, but possibly other ones too (never looked very far). Not sure for the app, it might be that it is using OGG streams with a custom DRM (which is probably the one some existing downloaders actually (ab)use).
It's called playplay. It's used for protecting their new lossless files. But the first rule of playplay is you can't talk about playplay. https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-dismantles-spotifydl-track-...
YouTube Music uses Widevine.
If it's on YouTube Music, it's also on... YouTube.
Not necessarily at the same quality though.
I assume in most cases they're literally the same files. Youtube runs "topic" channels for music that distributors have sent it.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g (same thing, but on an official channel instead)
You can load any youtube music song on youtube by just removing the "music" subdomain.
Then why do you say they might not be the same files?
Let me start over. Youtube itself has DRM required for certain videos, and certain formats of videos.
The 256 kbps format for music will be protected by DRM. If you do not have DRM available youtube will fallback to a lower quality format to play the auduo.
Music might have higher quality audio-only files as provided where Youtube might have it combined with video and a generic compression algorithm applied as with all other uploaded videos.
This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.
Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.
Spotify pays 70% of revenue to rights holders.
Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?
They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.
That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like.
Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.
And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.
Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.
As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.
Content creation as a career is probably dead.
(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.
(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)
(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).
That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?
> Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not
No, you literally can't.
I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.
Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.
No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".
The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.
After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.
When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ".
Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.
Yes, when the entertainment industry came onboard they immediately made the service much worse. I reacted the same way you did.
IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.
> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.
Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.
The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.
If you don't remember, why speculate?
Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.
They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.
I just started DJing and something I quickly noticed is how garbage Spotify's music sounds compared to FLACs I've purchased. The max bitrate is very low.
Spotify just (last week or 2 weeks ago) introduced lossless compression (FLAC) and it sounds amazing.
Wow didn't know about that, thanks.
tidal is a thing and can be scraped the same way. I wonder how big that collection would be as it can go from 50mb to 300mb for 3min
Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?
Spotify pays the rightsholders. What are they supposed to do about the shitty contracts that the artists signs with the labels?
I am providing my own music on Spotify via a distributor I a pay 50 Euros once. What do I get from Spotify? Basically nothing! It is not the rightholders as I am the rightholder! Spotify is a scam for artist.
Copyright is a scam for artists.
They don't pay any artist who has less than 1000/Streams per Song per Year.
They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments.
Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify.
If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch.
I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about.
Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
yeah it's wild to me how folks will defend the current status quo when it's clearly broken.
people defend convenience way too much. spotify isn't good for us and spotify-like-streaming is destroying the music industry.
this argument is so tired.
most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em.
Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars.
youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money.
now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.
> most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control.
Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
I think it was was Les Claypool (of the band Primus) who said on some podcast that recording a studio album with its attendant very non-trivial costs is really just creating a very expensive business card to hand out to prospective clients.
Back then, that is. It probably cost $250k in 1990 for them to record Frizzle Fry in a studio, handwave $500k in 2025 dollars. But Bandcamp on MacBook and some gear from GuitarStudio, round to $15k and your time. neither of which isn't trivial or cheap, but it's not 1990 no more.
It takes time and effort to receive money, especially from consumers worldwide. Most hobbyists would not going to deal with all the complexity in it.
> I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales.
i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture.
Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream.
That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams.
I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly.
also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists.
piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.
Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b.
Youtube also paid out literally 50x more to creators in 2024 than Patreon had total subscriptions on the platform.
These big platform payouts matter a lot.
> This is not small potatoes
Unless you're a small potato. Approximately 0% of what I pay for spotify goes to the artists I actually listen to. Fucking Taylor Swift and the Beatles estate don't need my money.
As a reasonably known but not super popular bluegrass artist, I agree: please steal my music instead of paying Spotify for it.
Hell, Weird Al himself only made $12 from Spotify views in 2023.
And Joe Rogan...
To rights owners, not to artists. It's not a trivial difference. Ask Taylor Swift.
Some quick Googling shows 1 million streams pays approx $2000.
You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.
be aware that payout rates change based on tiers and a bunch of other factors. So, it would likely take more than 40 million streams to earn $80k.
I believe Weird Al posted his streaming revenue a few years ago. He had something like 80 million streams and said he earned about $12. https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/weird-al-yankovic-wrappe...
There is a reason people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly, it's how they make money. Weird Al is known for his amazing live shows, there's a reason for it: they make more money.
Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.
Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).
> Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.
What are the rough rates for each pool? That's the important part here. And how many artists are far enough from the average ratio that the detail of two pools matters.
https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/ This site says $0.00238 is typical for "worldwide" and a lot more than that for US and Europe specifically.
I'd be interested in knowing that too, as far as I know Spotify doesn't publish details to the public at least.
But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India.
Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices.
We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already.
Anything that gives different value to different artists is probably going to favor the big ones and just make things worse.
CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it.
The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.
I do think allocating money per-account or something should be better. Don't let a constant listener allocate the royalties from ten other people.
Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.
> people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly
Maybe not the best comparison to anything. Swift is known for being an even better busiensswoman than artist and obsessed with having control.
She screwed her record company for profits, not the other way around. Not many people have done that. She's likely making money on both ends of the stick.
The Pudding had a nice article explaining how streaming revenue is distributed: https://pudding.cool/2022/06/streaming/
When he says "so if I'm doing the math right that means I earned $12" I interpret that as him exaggerating for effect. It's definitely not him citing the pay slip.
"$2 or more per thousand streams, split across rightsholders" seems like an accurate estimate.
That seems reasonable?
Assume an artist (either directly or through a rights holder) makes 1/3 income from streaming, 1/3 from merch and physical albums, and 1/3 from live events.
40m streams per year would be 800k per week. 200k fans worldwide playing 4 times per week on average could get you there. Thats like a decent sized but not enormous youtube channel.
200k fans worldwide would also support the ticket sales and merchandise sales aspects.
You only need 5000 fans to buy your CD/album/w.e at $15 to make 80k
Per year, which is a big lift compared to them pressing play on Spotify
Yeah but you need a quarter million people every week according to that guy. That will drop off over time.
But you only need to record your song once and get money forever. Nobody pays me per function invocation in production, that would be very nice
99% of that 10 billion went to a handful of artists. Actually, I'd wager nearly half of it went to labels and other middlemen, but that's beside the point. The vast majority of money in the music industry never trickles down, ever.
edit: I looked it up, 70% of spotify's payouts go directly to labels, not artists. So...that $10 bil is nothing.
This is by design and it's the same broken system that metallica defended in the 90s/00s because it benefits large artists while fucking over the other 99%.
We keep repeating the same script using the same busted short term logic.
Labels suck but when we're considering the merits of Spotify it's not their fault and artists can put music on the service without an abusive label.
Weird Al pointed out in 2023 that his 80 million Spotify views that year netted him $12 - enough for a nice sandwich.
Ah so you're only stealing a bit of money from the artists. That's ok then.
Touring makes almost no money. Only concerts with >1000ppl make money. Below that you can assume not even the sound engineer gets paid.
Not true at all. I support small artists and it's the only way they make money. Ticket sales and merch make up the vast majority of artist revenue for artists who arent in the top 1%. Most musicians don't make money if they aren't touring or selling merch somehow.
there's also the invaluable aspect of networking that touring allows. bit of a tangent, but it's very important for musicians to network.
The exception are musicians who do production stuff. Think movie/tv scores, commercials, etc. I actually know a handful of artists who used to tour quite a lot but eventually settled down to do production stuff. So they transitioned from touring to make money to production. Touring all year with no healthcare catches up to people.
I know a number of musicians that tour nightclubs, small venues, and festivals.
They make a living; not a luxurious one, but they do OK. They just enjoy making music, and feel that it's worth it. Many of them never even record their music.
> Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?
The first users of this dataset will be Big Tech corps. Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple will all be happy to use this dataset for training their LLMs.
For them, 300TB is just cheap
They already have this data. See jukebox from OpenAI, released before chatgpt.
Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?
This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
What, precisely, is the point you’re trying to make here?
Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"
I hope readers will feel our frustration.
Well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
I'm reminded of the Zero One Infinity rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule)
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
How does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There's virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.
Personally as an artist I'd rather give it to people directly for free but I'll meet the audience where they are. The "compensation" does not factor into it at all.
Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)
updated - thank you commenters for making it clear that my sentiment was not clear
Spotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.
I believe that we need to distinguish between convenience and preservation here. It is indeed convenient for consumers to use Spotify now whilst it exists and operates the way it does. They could go under, they could change their business model, they could decide to purge everything that is not easily justifiable commercially.
As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.
Id be stunned if we didn't find out Anna's Archive is a front for a handful of shadier VCs who are into AI. Even if AA themselves don't know it and just take the cash.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners
Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that Google controls this.)
To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD
I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.
Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.
> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there
So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.
I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.
They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.
No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.
> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.
Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.
Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.
What.cd were extreme sticklers for quality! When you applied to get in, they did a live interview on IRC to test your knowledge of ripping, transcoding, and different kinds of compression, how torrents and private trackers work, and their code of conduct. I remember studying for it. They also had ways to make sure you weren't cheating like checking your screen, as well as very aggressive automated checks for VPNs and blocklisted IPs to prevent ban evasion and multiple accounts.
They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.
Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!
I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform.
One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.
Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old internet and would love to take a look.
It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.
How does it compare to rutracker, especially for electrnic music? I've never used what.CD and rutracker seems to have lots of high quality music.
Thank you. I’m reading about them, cool project. I’ll try to join.
Another comment mentioned Redacted.sh as a successor. I haven't used it. I'm sure there's a subreddit around that can help. Looks like orpheus is another option if I'm reading correctly. You have to get an invite or pass an "interview" though, so be prepared to wait a while.
the compilation album is a great idea. thanks for that. your comments in here have been helpful. have fun listening.
Yeah, What.CD had a bunch of the local Brisbane post-rock bands from the 00s on there which was amazing to me. I at least have copies of a lot of their records!
email me please
True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.
This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.
That's why I use YouTube Music as my streamer as they allow damned near anyone to upload any old rare record and then figure out the royalties somehow.
FWIW archive.org has a lot of live music as well
Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.
Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
Don't you consider it best to ... redact ... your post, as it's the only one mentioning it by name?
It's hardly a secret, you can go on r/trackers where people discuss private trackers for every media type
Some people just don't know when to shut the hell up.
At the end of the day it feels like the private trackers are such a nightmare to get invited to and maintain ratio at it’s just not worth the effort.
I want this torrent though. It would be fun to stand up a NAS for this.
The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular.
I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.
Generally speaking, trackers that require a ratio above 1.0 and don't have freeleech/point system are designed so that you pay the website to fix your ratio and/or rent a seedbox from one of their partner.
It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0.
And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
[dead]
Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really.
(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
This, a thousand times this. I have gone back to collecting CDs because it's often the only remaining way (short of pircay) to get original masters of many artists. Even lossless download stores like Qobuz don't have them.
Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).
You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
>We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
They're still kind of around, but yeah, everything is very much on it's way out in the music scene, at least in terms of that late 90s early 00s culture. Or has been until recently. There is a renewed interest in self-hosting and "offline" style music collections.
It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes. When self-hosting music comes up this is always one of the top questions people have: How do you find new music?
The answer isn't that hard and really hasn't changed much. People just don't want to spend any time or effort doing it. Music stores still exist, they're amazing. Lots of 2nd hand stores carry vinyl and CDs now, which can give you great ideas for new music. There are self-hosted AI solutions and tools. Last.fm and Scrobbling are still very much around. My scrobble history is so insanely useful. There are music discords. Friends. Asking people what they're listening to in public. Live shows with unique openers(I once went to a Ben Kweller show with 4 opening bands, I still listen to 3 of them.)
One thing you haven't noted is radio.
Some local radio DJs frequently play songs I enjoy that have under 1K plays on youtube. No algo or platform is surfacing those. Local radio gets me both local and international music. A friend of mine prefers critically acclaimed stuff, so he streams radio shows from NTS and the like.
> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.
I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.
Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.
So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.
Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.
(And I say this as a music enthusiast myself)
I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk
I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.
Soulseek has to be the best kept secret on the internet. Even people my age who grew up with things like Napster, Limewire, and even soulseek, don’t know that it still exists.
The amount of extremely obscure music on there is crazy, stuff that exists nowhere else in the internet except maybe google drive links.
Yeah, I was looking for some rare album I had in the past, and was shocked to realize that Soulseek is still active.
That being sad, I have a lot of non-mainstream tracks in my playlists on YouTube Music that have YouTube comments along the line of “I wish this was available on Spotify :’(“. I bet the same goes for What.CD.
So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.
about the scale, the same album in the tracker had several submissions, for dedicated format and regional editions.
while one can compare in terms of number of tracks, the quality used to be in another level altogether. from the article:
> The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s.
meanwhile the tracker had 16/24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track's metadata was verified for any artifacts. for the given quality, one could rip youtube music (maybe not as easily anymore) and achieve a larger scale in a similar quality level.
now if hypothetically tidal had all the music of the world and was accessible this way, then it would be a comparable resource. insane regardless.
anna's rip has ~86m tracks, not ~186. ~186m is metadata, specifically ISRCs.
Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories! OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical community
Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.
> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth.
It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.
There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.
And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.
This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite:
- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included
- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.
This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.
Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.
I just found out that https://annas-archive.li/ is masked by my German internet provider (SIM.de/Drillisch). I usually use a VPN but I had it switched off temp. to watch Fallout (Prime Video won't let you watch through a VPN). Only when I switched Mullvad back on could I open the site.
I didn't know German providers do this.
Yeah this is actually quite nefarious, as it is a private organization that decides what sites get blocked, with no legal oversight.
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearingstelle_Urheberrecht_im...
- https://netzpolitik.org/2024/cuii-liste-diese-websites-sperr...
Its a DNS based block, so overriding your default DNS server is enough to circumvent it. I think Dns over Https also works.
Pretty sure this was a thing in the past, but that currently it has to be a court order.
The wikipedia article seems to concur with you, although this seems to be a voluntary policy by CUII, the members could still decide to not wait for any court orders and block whatever they want.
I think it's a DNS level block. I've been using NextDNS (free plan) and one side effect (besides auto ad block) is that it doesn't have those blocks. Highly recommend - there are alternative services as well, just saw NextDNS recommended here.
Alternative: https://archive.ph/2025.12.21-050644/https://annas-archive.l...
Someone compiled a list of blocked domains (by probing different DNS servers):
https://cuiiliste.de/
This is also how, for example, RT is blocked in Germany.
In that vein, I am trying to find out why searching for
which should trivially yield http://github.com/alextud/PopcornTimeTV results in anything but that one particular URL in every search engine: Google, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, BingThey even find a fork of that particular repo, which in turn links back to it, but refuse to show the result I want. Have't found any DMCA notices. What is going on?
They have marked the repo as noindex (or GitHub is forcing a noindex header).
Its returning a noindex flag so every serp is correctly doing what the repo has been asked.
That is... except for brave! I checked on my searx instance and it still showed up in brave's results
Try Yandex search, trust me later.
It has 0 censorship - regarding pirated content at least.
Very interesting. The security page does show up on kagi at #6.
I wonder if GitHub flags it to not be indexed or something.
Also true in the Netherlands, I hate these copyright freaks constantly trying to restrict access.
Was also shocked to see that (Berlin, Telekom here).
They also block some foreign "news" like Russia Today last time I checked.
This work is so critical.
Read an article that was published just 10 years ago, and witness the bit rot as most external links will 404, gone forever.
I think it's worth questioning the value of preserving -everything-, but it seems like if we can, we should.
You know, I had the (at time of writing) 600 something comments ran through Opus 4.5 and do a summary of the sentiments. It could't find a single comment that genuinely defends Spotify or expresses sympathy for the company.
HN crowd is, of course, biased in the technocratic sense, but you see - everyone seems to actually rejoice the move.
The closest to remorse is `linhns` and `locusofself` expressing concern about artists getting hurt (not Spotify itself), but locusofself prefaces with "I hate spotify as a company but..."
(disclaimer: this text is NOT LLM generated, I wrote myself a summary of the summary. here's the Claude thread should anyone care https://claude.ai/share/cfc4ca63-2b9e-47ac-a360-202025d1a134)
Are those 404 links available on web.archive.org?
I recall many interesting tracks that were very aggressively deleted from all platforms in sync. I wonder if I could find them in this archive.
There is contemporary lost media being created every day because of how we distribute things now. I think in some cases, the intent of the publisher was to literally destroy every copy of the information. I understand the legal arguments for this, but from a spiritual perspective, this is one of the most offensive things I can imagine. Intentionally destroying all copies of a creative work is simply evil. I don't care how you frame it.
Making media effectively lost is not much different in my mind. Is it available if it's sitting on a tape in an iron mountain bunker that no one will ever look at again?
Incredible.
> A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.
They wont and shouldn’t divulge the details, but I imagine that would be a fun read!
How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.
I would guess this can be hidden under normal music streaming activity? But one would need lots of proxies!
Rent a dedicated server, setup mullvad wireguard on it or whatever. Download stuff to said server using wireguard.
Sure, you can also use Tor. The people engaged in copyright-related illegality generally don't.
But then you need to rent a server without leaving any hint on your real identity. Which means going to some dodgy corners of the internet.
I certainly wouldn't attempt
Depends on your threat model, you'd probably have to be scraping at a pretty large scale for anyone to try pursuing you through vpn providers.
This is unquestionably a large scale.
It's hard to imagine anything but physical egress for that kind of volume.
50 free accounts continually streaming music rack up 20 TB in a month. So that would take about 1.5 years. Our you use 750 accounts and do it in a month.
I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.
That’s if they pretend to stream the music. If they are using throwaway free accounts I imagine they can download the DRM-stripped files much more quickly.
True, but I could see them rate limiting that much more aggressively than streaming.
You can download playlists for offline use, it'll go pretty fast. I doubt they monitor it that hard.
You can probably just buy a thousand hacked spotify accounts for not much more than $1 a piece
Perhaps they leased a botnet. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/10/aisuru-botnet-shifts-fro...
I mean 300TB is nothing for a streaming service, like it woudn't even show on a dashboard. They probably did that over weeks which is invisible.
It is not hard. But please don't misuse it and ruin the fun for everyone. It is nice to be able to use the music relatively easily for hobby projects. My music server has functionality to play tracks from Spotify this way:
https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/sp...
Where the magic actually happens: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
I wonder how many premium accounts Anna’s Archive had to use to scrape the whole thing. Surely Spotify has scrape protection and wouldn’t allow a single account to stream (download) millions of separate tracks.
I have a feeling they didn't use premium accounts since they downloaded at 160kbit/s, which is the highest quality that free accounts can get.
Premium gets 320kbit/s (or lossless)
to use this method of scraping, logging in with a premium account is required.
so either they found a way around that lock, but not the quality lock, or they just decided 160k is good enough (it generally is), and decided to stick with that for filesize & bandwidth savings
I haven't looked at the code but I would be surprised if the premium account "requirement" is anything more than an if statement that can be commented out.
Pretty sure that requirement is server-side?
What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be.
My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.
My understanding, based on a related comment in this thread, was that premium accounts get higher quality; in that case, I figured any such checks would be server-side.
If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.
Hm, maybe. I don't remember whether they offer higher quality. If they do, it would make sense to have that check on the server side. It's been a while since I last used Spotify because they deleted my account in 2022 without warning when they left Russia.
But I was referring specifically to all third-party reverse-engineered Spotify players requiring premium accounts to function at all.
You are correct
I believe that changed recently and Spotify started blocking the key requests from free accounts.
Then how do people with free accounts listen to music lol
(It is plausible they added some new DRM but it's not going to be anything too crazy)
Seems like librespot is not directly suppporting the fetching of audio to files, and intentionally so, in order to not get targeted by Spotify. Obviously you can dump the audio to file as it "plays", but that would be be very slow.
So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.
"at scale" could mean they had direct access to a server or to storage, maybe because they had an insider giving them access, or they found secrets that had leaked somewhere?
they're probably just using something like https://github.com/nor-dee/spotizerr-spotify
No way, that would take far too long.
Probably not, those tools don't actually download Spotify tracks at source quality.
There are tools that actually download directly from Spotify (needs premium then) but yeah most of them just use the search and download from other sources like YouTube without mentioning it. I won't say which tools download directly out of fear that they get killed but they exist.
Sadly since zspotify was killed I don't know of any remaining tools.
votify
Truly amazing work. I couldn't help but being sad of the less popular songs not being currently stored, as those are definitely the ones more in risk of being lost forever.
If you like the goal and you have even a few 100gb available on your server, consider "donating" some of that space to seeding the data (music or books). It's absolutely how we can fight the system, even if just a tiny bit. https://annas-archive.org/torrents
Going off the blog post, archiving the rest of Spotify (which only represents 0.4% of total listens) would bring the total size up to something like 1PB, and would likely include a huge amount of AI generated stuff, which I don't think is worth it. I'd rather see them focus resources on archiving other stuff.
Sure but "the other stuff" is Lady Gaga and Bunny, which we won't have issue finding a copy of.
Sure, there is AI stuff but also not.
You'd hope there is room for a lot of stuff in between as well. I tried searching for some of yhe more unknown artists I follow (and have bought stuff from!) but didn't see any clear way to filter it to Spotify/music metadata only. Restricting to metadata+other cuts it down somewhat but it's still 100s of results for most topics.
Will be interesting to see what's there and not once the actual music torrents come up, should make it easier to search.
It's in their roadmap, from what they said. I'd imagine they wouldn't reject someone who wanted to contribute that feature to the project.
Hmm. This is actually not really something I need, I think; but I consider anna's archive etc... as about as important as the internet web archive. We need to preserve data, at the least important data, also historic data - how the original websites looked. Creativity of past generations. Same for games and books.
It may be only ~30 years for webpages to have emerged, but there are also many young people who may not have experienced that since they are too young to have experienced it. There is always a generational change; our generation has the opportunity to store more things.
Hmmm I don’t like this. There are sources for music with better quality out there and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution. I am worried about losing their ebook library. Quoting from the announcement: “Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved.“ They should have done this as a separate identity.
The main difference is that people can re-host and seed part of the data by offering space in their own servers.
If AA goes down, it's not the end of it all, a new one comes back up and the seeders are still there.
A lot of the ebook data has very few seeders, and it very much looks like they may all be AA. I assume it is a handful of people who this all relies on. I doubt there are many complete mirrors, if any. And even if there are, who of those are not only willing to seed but also run and redo all of the necessary infrastructure when shit hits the fan. As far as I can see, there is currently only one place left to actually contribute and upload material. The torrent music scene is a number of multitudes larger than that.
"and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution"
They are based in russia. And they currently do not work together so well with the west.
So it is imaginable, that if some people give Trump quite some money, to make Annas takedown part of some deal to lift sanctions after a ceasefire in Ukraine, but .. it does not seem like it. I rather suspect more effort in the west to block access to unwanted sites like this. My ISP in germany is already blocking it.
Your ISP is filtering DNS records. Easily fixed by changing DNS. It may even speed up your lookups, as most ISP DNS are slower than the large ones like quad1/8/9.
> They are based in russia.
“Russian authorities have without any notice suspended Russia's most popular file-sharing website torrents.ru for the alleged violation of copyright laws.” (2010) https://www.petosevic.com/resources/news/2010/03/000350
“In 2016, for example, the Moscow City Court (Mosgorsud) granted more than 700 requests to protect intellectual property.” https://www.group-ib.com/blog/torrents/
“The ISPs in Russia are required to block subscriber access to thepiratebay.se and thepiratebay.mn following the complaint of […]” (2015) https://www.maverickeye.de/russia-has-ordered-local-isps-to-...
“Roskomnadzor, the country’s telecom and media industries regulating body wants people to pay, so in 2016 it’s going to block Russia’s 15 most popular torrent websites” https://www.inverse.com/article/9619-russia-will-crack-down-...
etc
There are plenty of Russian music labels. Big book publishers? Not so much. Some sites explicitly ban content from the hosting country to try and avoid that. Not the case here.
> They are based in russia.
Are you sure? I don't think they are, from what I've seen
Trump threatened the EU to tax Spotify (and others) just this week. So it doesn’t look like Trump would be happy to help Spotify out, though in exchange for money he’ll probably change his mind.
This is something really important, especially in the days when music and film vanishes from platforms one by one. I myself have three playlists with greyed out titles (titles are missing so there's no possibility for me to find out what was there).
That's why I divide music to the one that I want to have forever - I buy it on CDs - and dance music that I can live without one day
I really appreciate platforms that still show the titles and metadada after something is removed. Then at least I can go find it again to maintain my collection. Tidal does this.
Not that we should, but it's technically feasible to have a music streaming server with the torrent as the backend, and selectively download the part of the torrent in respond to on-demand streaming request from the client.
spotify used to do just that (stream p2p) until 2014 or so
https://www.scribd.com/document/56651812/kreitz-spotify-kth1...
The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus
https://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify/kreitz-spotify_kth11...
KTH link is better than scribd for downloading. though academic links are sometimes prone to link rot.
I recently got into the whole homelab *arr stack for things like movies and tv and while I know options exist for music I just don’t see the need yet price-wise. Spotify is still just cheap enough for me to not care enough. We’ll see how long this holds.
That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.
I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.
for me its the arms trade.
Daniel Ek pours spotify wealth into next gen miltech.
sometimes I worry that I don't know what music means to other people but I am certain that to me it is antithetical to war culture.
I feel like Ek receives a disproportional amount of hate for this. You have all these American CEO's pouring their investments in the American war machine (Palantir, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc) and no one bats an eye.
Is it because this time it's going to a European company?
No, it's because Spotify is a consumer facing brand that people interact with daily and are aware of even if they don't use it. Also they're notorious for not paying artists well.
Actually there are a whole lot of musicians who find pride in "punching nazis" so to speak, but you are entitled to your Russian sympathies.
ok I think I remember this one where disliking war means I side with whoever you think your enemy is today.
I'm not american and I'm not interested in your ideas about who to kill.
Practically nobody "likes" war. However, when facing adversaries like Putin who don't care for democracy, human life, human rights, agreements and contracts, who have no conviction beyond "might makes right", not ensuring clearly superior military capabilities ultimately means submitting to their plans of domination. Reflexively rejecting any kind of military investment is naïve and plays into the hands of the likes of Putin. It is no surprise that in the west, political parties and actors with proven ties to the Russian regime predominantly promote this faux-pacifist narrative, effectively inviting the fox into the chicken pen.
yes you've got me, I'm a russian agent trying to fool you into questioning the arms trade.
was it the accent?
I did not mean to imply that at all.
I'd rather download music and buy LP's, especially from smaller artists, than having a Spotify subscription. They get a much bigger cut and I get something tangible, if unpractical. The only ironic part is that a lot of small artists only print an extremely limited number of LP's, I don't understand why they don't let people purchase their stuff? Like maybe it's for the "limited feeling", but that just feels dumb as fuck.
I'm paying for youtube music, but on the side I started buying records in bandcamp directly from artists and putting them in my jellyfin library. I do use lidarr for some older tracks. I think the ecosystem is starting to look good enough, where you can have your own personal spotify.
Yeah we shouldn’t. But we may.
a la "Popcorn Time."
The metadata alone is incredibly valuable for researchers. Having 186 million ISRCs catalogued with associated genre, tempo, and popularity data is a goldmine for music analysis that doesn't even require touching the audio files.
Anna’s Archive has largely flown under the radar by focusing on books.
Even perceived involvement in music piracy puts a much bigger target on their back from far more aggressive actors (RIAA, major labels)
The bulk of today's customers has no idea how to pirate music, so they're not really a threat anymore. Music streaming has been rather convenient, you pretty much get the same content across all services. Video streaming platforms have, unfortunately become fragmented and, as of late, ad-ridden.
“Good luck, we don’t care.” is their stance, as far as I can tell.
Is the music torrent not up yet? Only see the metadata one here: https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify
Yeah, in the article they write:
The data will be released in different stages on our Torrents page:
[X] Metadata (Dec 2025)
[ ] Music files (releasing in order of popularity)
[ ] Additional file metadata (torrent paths and checksums)
[ ] Album art
[ ] .zstdpatch files (to reconstruct original files before we added embedded metadata)
Oh I see, thanks! I missed that
Quoting from their page:
--------------
This is by far the largest music metadata database that is publicly available. For comparison, we have 256 million tracks, while others have 50-150 million. Our data is well-annotated: MusicBrainz has 5 million unique ISRCs, while our database has 186 million.
--------------
If they truly are on a mission to protect world's information from disappearing, they should work with MusicBrainz to get this data on it.
Alternatively, it would be amazing, if they built a MusicBrainz like service around it.
In either case, to make the data truly useful, they'd need to solve the problem on how to match the metadata to a fingerprint used to identify the music tracks, assuming that data is not part of the metadata they collected.
It would be reasonably trivial to set up a bot that mass-imports metadata from Spotify to MusicBrainz (note that MB rules do not allow this, community cleanup from a single user doing this with another source, years ago, is still ongoing).
The value that MusicBrainz adds is the community editor who spent a few hours going through YouTube videos and wayback machine social links to figure out that Fog (Wellington, NZ, punk/post-punk) and Fog (Auckland, NZ, Post-Punk) are different bands - even if they share a Spotify profile. The editor that hunted down and listened to 5 compilations that have mixed up a radio edit and an original mix of a track, to find out which is which, and separate them in MB and make notes. [these are made up examples]
That's not to imply that these two projects are 'competing', or that the ISRC figure comparison isn't useful and correct. But community database + scraped data is apples and oranges. And a mixed fruit bowl is wonderful.
I was wondering if MB had any rules on such things. I get the motivation, but I hope they'd be willing to work with some trusted editors to figure out if this data would be useful/could be imported without risking quality.
But MB is one of the best resources out there - precisely because of what you said - so I'm not complaining too much :)
they also offer a bunch of stuff like
- searchable website
- incredible well thought out postgres database that differentiates, for example, a recording from a release (and much, much more)
- ability to replicate changes to said database hourly to your own environment
- workable system for schema updates
- cover art archive
- refined interface for submitting/moderating listings
- etc.
> n either case, to make the data truly useful, they'd need to solve the problem on how to match the metadata to a fingerprint used to identify the music tracks
How is that a problem?
Since the article asks:
> We're curious about the peaks at whole minutes (particularly 2:00, 3:00, 4:00). If you know why this is, please let us know!
As a hobby video/audio editor, people will start with their track taking up a preset amount and fill up the time - even if it means having some dead space at the end.
The other alternative is algorithmically created music.
I've heard 2:00 is some kinda sweet spot for the Spotify algorithm and payouts? You get paid per play so you don't want to it too long, but if your track is much shorter than two minutes you get penalized or something. I know they've had to remove ambient tracks that were cut into 40 second clips as part of this.
So you might see a lot of anchoring just like YouTube videos kept stretching to almost exactly ten minutes?
The data analysis here is interesting. One thing that stood out to me is that black metal is the 6th most common musical genre for bands, right after rockabilly. I would never have expected that.
Moral and legal discussion aside, this is technically very impressive. I also wouldn’t be surprised if this somehow kickstarts open source music generative AI from China.
This already exists and is interesting to play around with - https://github.com/ASLP-lab/DiffRhythm
This is one of the greatest news I've ever heard for the digital preservation community. Just so many projects over the years could have used resources like this. Thank you for contributing to humankind!
Site is down for me. Archive link: https://archive.is/jf3HW
Probably not down, but blocked by your ISP. Try a VPN. Same thing happens here.
Yes, blocked. This is what I see in germany without a VPN
https://notice.cuii.info/
"Their buisness model is based on copyright infringement"
Well, where to complain that Anna's Archive ain't a buisness?
Aamzingly, I don't even get this page. I just see the default "this page is not available" from my browser. I'm with Vodafone, and I wonder if it is legal to pretend a site doesn't exist without notifying me.
Pretty sure it's DNS level block. So just using private DNS would be enough, no need for full blown VPN. It's just that VPNs also usually use their own DNS instead of the ISPs.
I recommend NextDNS or similar to bypass those DNS blocks and also block ads at a very deep level that works ok mobile and even inside apps.
I'd rather complain why somebody decides for me where what websites I'm allowed to open
Ironic. But its working for me.
Amazing! I wonder if the Every Noise At Once[1] site could be updated with the metadata from this?
[1] https://everynoise.com/
Thanks for linking that page, interesting rabbit hole that I hadn't heard about until today…
I would like a downloader! :D this is such an awesome project
I have Spotify premium but the constant shuffle of content availability has meant I’ve stared routinely archiving my liked songs to avoid any rug pull. Zspotify and co still work a charm.
I wonder how deep the hole they're gonna put whoever runs this site into is gonna be?
I heard they’re based in Russia so one assumes they probably will be welcomed by the current government (or even aided) rather than prosecuted.
Has anyone tried to add up the track file size from the metadata dump?
In spotify_clean_track_files.sqlite3:
That's only 14.5 TiB, nowhere near 300 TiB. What makes up the other 285 TiB of content?That's curious and changes things pretty dramatically. It's a lot easier to host 15TB than 300. I wonder what's up here.
Does the Spotify backup contain any so far grayed out or unavailable songs on their list?
I'm a music archivist & preservationist, I've archived and found several formerly lost or on the verge of becoming lost albums, EPs, and Singles, and I've been wondering if the backup of Spotify so far, even with the available info, contain any taken down, region limited, or no longer available songs?
any response is appreciated!
For a fully-legal alternative of metadata archiving, I suggest the iTunes EPF (Enterprise Partner Feed). https://performance-partners.apple.com/epf
The best metadata I've found, though, is the MySpace Dragon Hoard: https://archive.org/details/myspace_dragon_hoard_2010
That included the artist location, allowing me to tag songs based on their country. I then created playlists such as "NERAS" Non-English Rock Artist Sample, where the one most popular song for a particular artist was chosen, and only when the country of origin was not English-speaking, and the genre was Rock. I like listening to music while working, but English lyrics distract me because I understand what they're saying.
After discovering music via the MySpace archive, I've since purchased 73 songs from 35 artists that I'd never heard of before digging into the data. I rebuilt my playlist on Spotify, but got greyed out tracks, and YouTube Music, but got "unavailable video". So I still prefer purchasing tracks via the iTunes Music Store, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and 7digital.
Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.
Meanwhile, if you're interested in the genre-by-country MySpace data, or have questions about the iTunes EPF, feel free to reach out and we can discuss your research.
> Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.
I would guess that combining these sources, along with info from MusicBrainz, would help quite a bit? Still, I'm rather surprised Spotify doesn't provide more information about artists.
> Please note that Apple Music and iTunes Music data will be migrating away from the Enterprise Partner Feed (EPF). Starting July 16, 2024
I'd rather see them use AI to convert all the scanned scientific articles into proper PDF or other formats.
Also sort and classify the articles by binary size, vs page count, plot count, raster image count etc, in order to compress the outliers and detect when a raster image should have been a plot and convert it to vectorized images etc.
How compact can we get the collective human scientific corpus?
It seems to be that the metadata doesn't include the lyrics, probably because they are provided by Musixmatch. It would have been nice to have a database of lyrics linked to ISRCs. AFAIK Lrclib doesn't support downloading lyrics for a given ISRC.
great. Spotify just removes things all the time (things I actively listen to and work on for my jazz practices, one day just go "poof" because they didn't want to pay the record company anymore), and they are not as a company deserving of the role of "keeper of all the world's music". They don't give a shit and they'd vastly prefer we all listen to their AI generated royalty free crap and Joe Rogan.
We can finally search for playlists with a giving song! A basic feature that Spotify is missing!
Unrelated, but I just can't stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I'm a paying customer. Fuck you Spotify. You were supposed to be a convenient way to discover and listen to music. Now you are only convenient for listening to music, and absolutely terrible for any recommendations. This is sad really. Spotify had good recommendations. It's absolutely in a position where it can provide good recommendations — it has both a vast music library and a vast amount of data on user preferences. And it chooses to push procedural/ai-generated slop instead to earn more money. I thought that maybe buying $SPOT stock will make me more at peace with its greed, but it didn't work. Spotify fucking deserves to crash and burn because it sees paying customers as idiots who might not notice they are fed garbage. Fuck you Spotify, fuck you.
When they launched Discover Weekly thing, I used to add at least 1 track from it to my library - it was insanely good. Now it's all junk - not even close to what I listen to.
They also removed a lot of discovery features - Playlist Radio - for example. And they still do have some version of it on the backend, but you have to go through some weird mechanisms to trigger it - like play the last song in playlist, wait till it ends (or rewind) and you get the playlist radio. But it's also a crippled version of it - prefers playing the exact same popular songs for some reason.
Then they released this DJ thing, which is laughably bad. No Spotify, I don't want someone talking to me with useless information in between songs. Who though that was a good idea? Who actually uses that?
There hasn't been a change in Spotify in last 7 years or so that wasn't negative.
I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I'm still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it's specific to genres, but I haven't encountered any generated junk tracks.
Since relatively recently I'm getting AI music in my automatic radio. They look/sound like soulless facsimiles of the real thing.
It depends on the algorithm which often preferences "similarity" (for whatever definition of similarity is).
This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen through.
So you can really fall through the rabbit hole.
[1] He Talked A Big Game, Played A Small Tune by Dumpster Grooves. A better song than most human slop that sells stadiums. https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=mPBgJ_qO2AF80FGP
Wow, that channel is misrepresenting its songs as lost records. Pure cancer.
Yup.
There's also obvious care and human creation there as well.
They have several "artists". Bertha Mae Lightning gets the better lyrics and artangements. Virgil Dillard gets simpler tunes and the occasional weird grammar/lyrics. And so on.
I even saved that radio as a playlist to show people: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/072Wp3cFsziKBQlnglF5XM?si=... It has both obvious AI ("artist" by the name of promptgenix) and not-so-obvious (Enlly Blue, Dumpster Grooves).
The weird/sad/funny/ironic part? Many of those songs are still better than whatever Taylor Swift and a lot of other artists produce.
Really? How about asking google to "play bloomberg news on spotify" next time. Then see if you can remove the resulting chaos from your history so it won't start feeding you slop.
YouTube Music works pretty well for me. One great feature is that it includes not just a commercial music streaming catalog, but all user uploads of music on YouTube.
I had to chuck Youtube Music away when it was polluting my youtube playlists with stuff I was liking on youtube music. Me as a video viewer and me as a music listener are two completely different people.
and you can upload 100,000 of your own tracks to the service for your private use as well. It is a great service considering I am getting it as a side effect of youtube premium. Single handedly the last subscription I would cancel.
This is more frequent than you would assume. I’ve neither subscribed to Apple Music nor Spotify for this exact reason: I’m a millenial who would like to discover music.
Another extremely annoying effect is, being 40+, they only suggest music for my age. In “New” and “Trending”, I see Muse and Coldplay! I should make myself a fake ID just to discover new music, but that gets creepy very fast.
Why do you want a megacorp to tell you what to listen to!?? There are a million ways to do discovery where some enshitified corp isn’t incentivized to push something at you.
I think perhaps the assumption of the OP (I know mine was in the early days) was that "discovery" on Spotify would involve human tastemakers and some kind of dynamic aggregation of peer tastes that could lead to organic discovery of new music, no matter how niche or obscure.
As opposed to what it has now devolved into: the most basic of similarity matching always showing you the same few hundred songs, combined with increasingly numerous paid placements.
Why haven't you unsubscribed then?
199GB, only metadata released for now.
Magnet link found here: https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify
Are magnet links allowed on HN?
This might be the perfect time to do archiving before the entire internet gets inundated by sub-par AI generated content.
This is incredible. I once assembled a collection of 100,000 tracks for research on exploration of large music libraries. Essentially vector search. I was limited in storage and processing power to a single machine.
If I were to do it today, I could get so much farther with hyperscaler products and this dataset.
Can someone explain why C#/Db (major/minor) is the third most popular key? Very unexpected for me, since its relatively more difficult to play.
Both C#m and Db can be played on piano using only the black keys (skipping the 3rd note of the scale). This makes them easy keys for beginners. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but it could be related.
Anecdotally, I know a few vocalists that sound great in these keys and use them as a starting point
> Both C#m and Db can be played on piano using only the black keys (skipping the 3rd note of the scale)
For the major scale, there are 7 notes in the scale and only 5 black keys; you also need to skip ti, the 7th note.
For the minor scale ("C#m"), it's worse; only four of the five black keys are part of that scale.
And I would have thought that something intended to be played only on the black keys would be described as using a pentatonic scale anyway?
As a belated followup, I should observe that if you're playing "in C sharp minor" on the black keys, you're skipping notes 3, 6, and 7 of the scale... and those are the only notes that differ between a minor scale and a major scale, making the "minor" designation completely meaningless.
For electronic music, it's around the lowest bass root note that most systems can play well without a subwoofer. C pretty much requires a sub and things rarely go lower than that.
Electronic dance music is the biggest genre in the data. So then easy to play shouldn't matter. It's still an interesting question. I think playing Db is pretty nice on the piano even if it's not the easiest.
There is a sweet spot for the bass. Lower is better for deep bass, but too low and it stops being a recognizable note, and consumer speakers can't reproduce it. This effect exists though I'm not sure if it is the cause of the pattern here.
Difficult to play in what instrument?
C# I don’t believe was/is a common tuning for most western instruments, classical or modern.
A digital piano can transpose things to make it “easier” to play.
Cursory google search says that a sitar is traditionally tuned to something useful for c#
I’m curious if C# is one of those notes that lines up nicely with whatever crappy consumer stereos/subs were capable of reasonable reproducing in the 90s as electronic music was taking off and it stuck around as a tribal knowledge for getting more “oomph” out of your tracks.
I play piano and don’t mind playing in Db at all. The chords fit nicely in the hands
i believe the most popular reason is capo on 1st fret when writing songs, other factors coming 2nd or 3rd (electronic music, sped up old samples, etc)
Music files (releasing in order of popularity)
Increasing or decreasing? IMHO increasing would make more sense, as the most popular music is already mirrored in countless other places. It's the rare stuff that is most in need of preservation.
I wonder how much of the content there is AI-generated. Honestly, even as someone who was initially skeptical, I've found some of it to be rather good --- not knowing that it was AI-generated at first. Now if they could only reverse-engineer the prompt and only store the model, that would be an extremely efficient form of "compression".
Same model and same prompt won’t necessarily create the same result, unless I misunderstand how these audio models work.
It's possible to generate the same images and text from LMs by tweaking the settings, right? Are audio models different?
Yes and no - yes, in theory, but in practice, non-determinism can be introduced at different points along the stack. See Thinking Machines' post on LLM non-determinism: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
Attracting the ire of the music industry seems like a huge, unnecessary risk. I wish they had performed this as some kind of other entity to try to keep the ebook archive protected from the fallout. I fear this will not end well.
They can’t be touched by the music industry they’re based in Russia.
> Over-focus on the highest possible quality
This is not an issue in my view. I like the fact that I can download 100 MiB ultra-high resolution TIFF files of scans of photographs from the original negative from the Library of Congress and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC files of captures of 78 RPM records from the Internet Archive. In addition to maintaining completeness and quality of information, one of the main goals of preservation is to guard against further degradation and information loss. You should try to preserve the highest quality copies available (because they contain more information) and re-encoding (deliberate degradation) should only be used to create convenient access copies.
Inferior copies, in addition to being less informative, have the potential to misinform. Only the archivist will enjoy space savings. All the readers who might consult your library in the infinite future will bear the cost.
> ...(e.g. lossless FLAC). This inflates the file size...
This is entirely the wrong view. The file size of a raw capture compressed to FLAC should be thought of as the “true” or “correct” size. It is roughly the most efficient (balancing various trade-offs) representation of sampled audio data that we can presently achieve. In preservation we seek to preserve the item or signal itself and not simply what we might perceive thereof. This human-centric perception view is just wrong. There is data in film photographs which cannot be perceived visually yet can be of interest to researchers and be revealed with digital image analysis tools.
As an example of how much information celluloid can contain see: https://vimeo.com/89784677 (context: he is comparing a Blu-ray and a scan of a 35mm print)
TIL Anna's Archive is blocked in Germany (by a rather obtrusive MitM, I might add). Get redirected to a "Copyright Clearing House" or something.
I wonder if they'll explore other music services as well. As I understand it, Deezer, Qobuz, and Tidal can all get ripped easily enough. Although I'm not sure if they rate limit downloads past a certain point.
I'm a bit sad that they chose to focus on music rather than audiobooks. Creating an archive of audiobooks seem like it would be more aligned with their mission.
The metadata is gold, but I was immediately curious why why wouldnt go for Tidal first. Though what ever they have on Spotify I think is unique.
I just want to be able to backup my playlists. Maybe thats possible but last time I looked I could only find sites that wanted your login, not gonna happen.
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
I bet you can whip up a super simple script with an LLM to do this!
Not that using the Spotify API directly is all that hard but the spotipy library makes it even easier.
There are a few tools that can export your spotify playlists into folders of audio files. That's what I used a few years ago for my initial spotify -> navidrome migration.
But they're not that good. They look for the songs on youtube, and the versions uploaded there are often modified (or just very low quality). And I've had some issues with metadata. I'd say about 5% of my songs had some issues, and 1% were completely off.
Once they release the actual torrents and not just the metadata, I'm assuming that new playlist export tools will soon show up, and they'll use these new torrents as source instead of youtube. They'll be a lot more reliable. I'd wait for that to happen. In fact I may end up re-exporting my old spotify playlist.
This works nicely: https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader
This is where ChatGPT shines. Just ask it to write you a script, it'll give you all the instructions.
I've used ChatGPT to write a whole bunch of playlist logic scripts (e.g. create a playlist that takes tracks from playlists A, B and C, but exclude tracks in playlist D.)
I worry about potential bans from scraping files through this sort of thing.
No files are involved. It's about backing up the metadata -- your playlists, liked songs.
So you can recreate the playlists on another Spotify account or another music service.
You can also do this with your human brain, which doesn't require 1 MWh or a thousand gallons of water to write a script to pipe API results to jq.
Exactly the same here, I just wanna back up my playlists and liked songs, in an organised and tagged manner, at a non-potato quality.
`spotdl download "https://open.spotify.com/user/{username}" --user-auth --output '{list-name}/{title} - {artists}.{output-ext}'`
This is literally all you need to back up Spotify.
spotdl downloads from YouTube, not Spotify, afaik
this is a really incredible effort. but, for the developers and analysts currently working with music metadata in a world where so much of music is being consumed thru streaming services that keep a tight hold on how their metadata and album art can be used, i am constantly yearning for a way to link streaming releases to public metadata sources that can be manipulated, embedded, and queried. i've done my best to build my own w/o a background in data science, but it's a hole that desperately needs filling to enable the new generation of scrobbling/music listening habit exploration.
So nice! That's an excellent extract and looks useful for benchmarking Meilisearch. I'll probably spend my Christmas holidays importing the tracks, albums, and artists into Meilisearch, while my CEO builds a beautiful front-end for it. I'll probably replace [the current music search demo](https://music.meilisearch.com) we have with this much higher-quality dataset!
That would also be a good fit for [the new delta-encoded posting lists I am working on](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pull/5985). Let's see how good it can get. My early benchmarks showed a 50% reduction in disk usage.
Merry Christmas!
Full circle! Thank you! (https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...)
Thats huge, altho as a musician myself i am kinda scared of ai just taking all this data so they could make music better then me, i dunno maybe drop in there an anti ai trap zipbomb or somthing, that way it will work for normal users but not for ai
wow. Blocked in Belgium.
Error HTTP 451 - Unavailable For Legal Reasons
https://lumendatabase.org/notices/71398835
New multimodal training set just dropped.
Uh, cool, I guess? I want to applaud that, but, first off, unless you are OpenAI or Facebook, it is not exactly plausibly easy to participate in the festivities. Even if I had spare 300 TB laying around, how the fuck do I download that?
But, more importantly, I cannot even say "good for you", because I don't actually think it is good for Anna's Archive. I wouldn't touch that thing, if I was them. Do we even have any solid alternatives for books, if Anna's Archive gets shot down, by the way? Don't recommend Amazon, please.
BitTorrent protocol doesn’t force you to download all of the files of a torrent :)
Now imagine a dedicated music client that will download and stream (and share, because we are polite) only the needed files :)
I am in no way saying that this is cheap but 300 TB will set you back a little less than $6k with tax. Very attainable for people other than OpenAI and Facebook. And it's not crazy at all to snag a server with enough bays to house all those.
For reference, considering you can purchase a 12-month Spotify Premium subscription via a $99 gift card at the moment, that same $6k could be used for 60 years of Spotify Premium.
For reference, cosidering the backup has 86 million music files, at an average of 3 minutes per file it would take you around 490 years to listen to all the tracks.
I have a Supermicro 24 bay 2U in my house with an array around half that size in it. It’s not prohibitive.
The cost of rest of the hardware, running it constantly, and 'admin' overheads aren't to be scoffed at to be fair.
think popcorn time for mp3s/flac instead of mp4.
a client can selectively list and then stream individual files from a huge torrent. if you've ever watched illegal movies/shows on those random domain websites, you're likely streaming it from a torrent on the backend somewhere.
it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see some docker images pop up in a few days to do exactly this as a sort of "quasi-self-hosted jellyfin". Where a person host a thin client on a machine that then fetches the data from the torrent, then allows the user to "select" their library. A user can just select "Top hits from the 80s" and it'll grab those files from the torrent, then stream or back them up.
I don't really see why it wouldn't, from an end user perspective, be any different than a self hosted jellyfin or plexamp.
You can download torrents selectively. I think if they adopted that cautious attitude they wouldn't exist in the first place
Anna's archive mirrors z-lib and libgen, so those are the main alternatives. But it's unlikely anna's archive would go down so easily, they take a lot of precautions.
Oh, I was somehow under impression that libgen is no more. Glad to see it's not. I guess it was just a different domain.
Oh, just noticed my provider "Vodafone Germany" is blocking the domain annas-archive.li on DNS level.
>Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
There is a ton of good bands with under 10k or even 1k monthly listeners.
I hope someone builds an open API around this metadata. I'd love to have alternatives to the big player APIs.
How legal is this with regards to copyright laws?
Not legal. This group does not concern themselves with copyright law.
they do concern themselves with it, but in a "calling it out for being shit" kind of way.
Adherence to the legal framework is a function of your risk appetite.
Currently it says they have released metadata and album art. Is archiving and sharing the textual track metadata alone (no images, no audio) legal in the US, or Europe? By what basis is it legal or illegal?
Very, if we delete copyright like we're supposed to.
Not legal
Completely illegal.
The metadata scrape might not be.
Pretty sure any kind of scraping violates Spotify’s ToS.
ToS is not law except in the most draconian and authoritarian interpretations of the CFAA.
You are mistaken, it’s contract law.
Lawyer here -
A bunch of things:
1. You are all probably talking past each other - I expect the original question of legality was about criminal, and not civil, law.
2. I'm sure they did not view or sign the TOS to access this. You can't be bound to a contract you never view or intentionally assent to. At least in most countries/places.
For example, in the US I can show you tons of cases in just about every state and federal court where the court decided the TOS doesn't apply because it was never viewed or assented to.
IE cases like https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/nevada/nvdc...
(Ironically it works both ways, so if the contract provides you any guarantees, you can't take advantage of them to sue for breach if yuo never assented)
It's different if you can prove that they knew there was a TOS they would be bound by and just never bothered to look at the terms.
That is very hard to prove, and it does not suffice to prove that everybody has a TOS these days or whatever. You have to prove actual knowledge of a TOS by these particular defendants.
I use the US because it tends to be on the forefront of maximal browserwrap enforcement, so if it's not going to be enforced there, it's usually not going to be enforced anywhere
It's not. It's awful people justifying awful behaviour. And it's why we can't have nice things. There are always assholes ready to exploit others.
Monopoly is not a nice thing. Maybe it is convenient, but not nice.
People that gives money to artists are the ones going to concerts and buying music directly to artists. Spotify gives cents to artists, incetivizing awful behaviour (AI music, aggressive marketing, low effort art...).
There's some irony here considering Spotify used pirated mp3s at the start of their operations, I suppose.
Some people's urges to destroy all traces of human civilisation astonish me. What do you think Spotify is going to do with all its music when it ceases to exist in however many years? No, we must collectively feed Daniel Ek the Hungry.
You're talking about Spotify, right? Famously started by ad execs pirating music and then selling it.
Are you talking about Spotify here…?
lol is this comedy? Cuz it's absolutely hilarious opposite humor.
You must be the Spotify CEO, lol
Can this last?
I envision an army of lawyers and cyber security companies being prepared to unleash a scorched earth campaign that book publishers might want to be part of as well.
At the end it may take down more than just this publication but most others as well.
I am not enthused by this news. Let us entertain the possibility that similar institutions will eschew this catalog.
I wonder if Spotify will pursue any legal actions to take this archive or the site down!
Very interesting that a white noise track for babies is the 4th most popular track on Spotify.
Interesting if that is considered to be copyrightable. Any white noise track is perceptually indistinguishable from another, but none have the exact same sequence of samples except by chance, or if the noise generator happens to be deterministic as a function of time.
White noise isn't copyrightable.
Then how is silence copyrightable?
I find it so odd that people then to streaming services for stuff like this. I have a dedicated white noise machine, and when I travel, I use the white noise (bright noise actually) built into the iPhone.
Relying on an external hosted service would never cross my mind, and surely wouldn’t be something I go to on a daily basis.
You might find it interesting that there's an entire genre of youtube video that's designed to just be chucked one by one into slideshows for elementary school teachers to use as their lesson plan. Including videos that are just "2 minute timer for kids!"
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@Ask.the.Teacher
"Independent Reading: Count Up Timer for Classrooms": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfLfJtVeME8 straight up just stock imagery and a timer lol
It's not odd if you aren't the type who frequents hacker news. We are, after all, very much in a bubble here.
Amazing!
Is there any way to search this spotify database without downloading the currently available metadata torrent?
Wow. Anna is a godsend. Hopefully now we get some really good open source music models
First we need good stem splitting
What do you think about the recent SAM audio model by meta? https://ai.meta.com/blog/sam-audio/
Is it realtime?
> The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s.
Yeah, the original quality is either a 320kbps OGG or lossless. Not 160.
While this is _a_ backup, it's a pretty lossy one.
What an early christmas gift for humanity. Now, asking for a friend, what's the ideal setup for torrenting this? Mullvad / Tailscale?
https://annas-archive.li/llm
I want to time-travel back to 2000 like Old Biff with the sports almanac so I can tell Shawn Fanning to use the "it's for historical preservation" defense.
spotify undressed
I want to peek in that metadata collection to see if it could be used to identify the AI slop that's infecting Spotify.
If you could identify a track supposedly by artist X was actually AI slop not created by artist X, you could use that information to skip tracks on (web) music players, for example.
I wonder how definitive their collection is and how much ripping Google Music/YouTube would improve on this.
A distributed ripping project to do that would be a fine thing.
Plans to upload all this to musicbrainz soundid program?
Plans to upload all of this to music brainz soundid?
> ≥70% of songs are ones almost no one ever listens to (stream count < 1000).
So much interesting but undiscovered music is out there!
It would be interesting to find out how that has changed with the growth of the music industry over the years. I suspect that many of these <1000 streamed could be artificially generated for monetary purposes but I'm not entirely sure. That being said, there is a lot of good music with less than 1000 streams. I've been looking myslef and I've definitely found some hidden gems.
This is conspiracy theory territory but I wonder if big tech is sponsoring efforts like this as an easy way to get training data.
Downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive Please!
Downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive Please
I really don't understand how focusing on source quality files is supposed to be a "major issue" with the music preservation community. It's bizarre for them to talk about these being barriers for creating a "full archive of all music that humanity has ever produced" have and their answer be scraping Spotify to end up with a music library comprised of many AI and bulk produced songs at 75/160kbps.
the top 10,000 songs seem to be 99.9% top-40 corporate pop, which suprised me. thought a list that broad would pick up more that was outside the maintream ...
10,000 sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. Even my own personal music collection - which isn't all that impressive - is nearly 20,000 tracks.
For some reason, the link does not work for me (spain). Works perfect at the same time in tor browser.
GREAT DAY
Congrats! I’m sure the Spotify lawyers are gonna have some sleepless nights ahead.
Holy crap. This is going to trigger a five-alarm fire at Spotify Engineering. This has got to be among the largest proprietary datasets ever unintentionally publicized by a company.
Wasn't all data available to users though?
Yes but very hard to scrape in bulk from user accounts
I mean... not really? Not much music is Spotify exclusive (at least from the 99.6% of what people listen to mentioned in the article), and from friends in the industry I can guarantee you all major content platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a large chunk of YouTube) have already been completely copied without a business agreement with the rightsholders by AI startups and big-name players.
Who cares now, it's already downloaded and ready to be torrented... God is good
That’s why Spotify would lose against Apple. Spotify may need to pay a fortune for this scraper behaviour while Apple Music does not.
Is this all regions? I'm assuming so but I can't be sure
is there a torrent client already that is be good at partial downloads? I didn't realize how popcorn time worked until I read this thread.
All torrent clients must necessarily support partial downloads because of the nature of torrents. The files are split into pieces which are downloaded and then assembled by the torrent client.
"Partial downloads" in the context of torrenting usually refers to downloading specific files from a torrent
error 451 https://postimg.cc/QFddnW41
If only Spotify paid musicians their fair share
Oh this is going to go over real well in Nashville, TN.
We need insane for culture to survive.
This will be great to train AI on.
Looking at the analysis, I'm totally surprised opera and psytrance are so prolific.
Psy-trance... I thought it was the same as any other electronic genres, but do people get high and just start shoveling psy-trance tracks out or something?
Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists?
I mean, I'm sure there's some misclassification, but chamber music is basically a couple people with any sort of music training on classical instruments so that doesn't surprise me nearly as much... I can easily imagine there being _lots_ of those, and you might come up with a different artist name for each unique set of people you collaborate with.
Former classical singer here. Only theory I can come up with is that opera tends to have large casts where all the singers are credited individually which would inflate the absolute numbers of "artists" relative to other generes. I still struggle to imagine this accounting for bringing such a niche genera to the top here.
> Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists?
My guess is just the same opera performed by a ton of different orchestras, and perhaps the same orchestra for different recordings, times however many operas there are.
I'm assuming you don't know much about music then?
> do people get high and just start shoveling psy-trance tracks out or something?
Like with most art-forms, it's basically impossible to properly appreciate the art-form without having any context.
I was suspicious of this too. I don't think "genres" table is correct.
On Spotify, Blue Öyster Cult are listed as: ['album rock', 'classic rock', 'glam metal', 'hard rock', 'progressive rock', 'rock'] In the archive, they are just coming up as ['classic rock', 'hard rock']
Grimes: ['art pop', 'canadian electropop', 'grave wave', 'indietronica', 'metropopolis', 'neo-synthpop'] In the archive: ['art pop']
Taylor Swift: ['pop'] In the archive... nothing.
Seems Spotify have been removing genre info. Lots of "big" pop stars are no longer listed under pop.
My guess is a large portion of the psytrance music is slop, whether AI or some other form of auto-generation.
lol. Where is all this anti-psytrance hate coming from?
Are you people actually that childish that you don't understand the concept of taste, and that everyones' is different? People who have like different music than you aren't stupid. Electronic musicians aren't bad musicians.
You know that nice feeling you get when you listen to music from your preferred composer/artist/genre? Other people feel exactly the same, but with different kinds of music. Some people even love the thing that you hate! wow! Who knew? Except for anybody above the age of 5.
TLDR; just because you dont like Indian food, doesn't make Indian food bad. It's the same for music or other things that are dependent on taste.
lol. Where did I say I hate psytrance?
In fact, I have a fairly sizeable collection of trance music on my NAS, mainly more mainstream stuff, but some is psytrance.
It's unreasonable to assume psytrance would organically occupy such a large portion of top Spotify songs.
TLDR; just because I think large number of Spotify psytrance songs are AI generated, doesn't mean I hate psytrance. Only childish people would think that.
yo, this is insane!! why would anyone do that? I think it is for AI music generation models, like training them. Maybe ai labs people did it?? yeah that is likely
im thinking about the consolidation around minute marks. its at every minute mark below 10 minutes, albeit dropping precipitously after 4 minutes. i have 2 guesses. guess one is that people like even numbers so if a track was already going to be within so many seconds of exactly a minute mark that they are more likely to push it to that number. with people caring less above 4 minutes because you are already making a long song, i could imagine caring less at that point. but my second guess is that along with the vast increase of ai slop posted to spotify both by spotify themselves and by other people, some of the programs they use probably fix on minute increments. like how a lot of ai videos are 10 seconds long or a series of 10 second videos. just a guess, however. i have no information or facts to back this up
Is there a way to see the shape of the metadata?
I hope they get the new lossless versions
Well done !
Until we have reasonable copyright terms, Pirate On !
Yes, but do they have the one that goes like: to-to-to dotodoo? Hmmm? Do they?
Now, anyone with some decent info on signal processing and machine learning can build his/her own Shazam.
free the music
Just buy music DRM-free in the first place.
I’m hugely disappointed in Anna’s archive. As much as they believed they were doing this for good, they have now allowed bad faith actors to obtain all music for AI gen. This is just horrific for all artists out there who are fighting against so many issues that impact their creativity and sustainability. Why not just digest the data and not allow the music out there. As usual artists get fucked over.
the metadata alone is a staggering couple hundred gb, however it contains quite handy information to play with. consider the following:
> /audio-features/{id} "Get audio feature information for a single track identified by its unique Spotify ID."
this combined with track metadata can finally allow those motivated enough to create their own personalized shuffle. potentially better than the slop we get nowadays. no generative ai required*.
is this not highly illegal?
At first I was thinking "ok maybe they only backed up artists who released under some kind of like... public open source music sharing license"
then I read deeper... I had never heard of Anna's Archive before. Feels similar to ThePirateBay2.0. Surprised they are so public about their crimes?
wow
Wow. Now I just need some hard drives and a way to download that without my ISP doing something about it. That's amazing.
> and a way to download that without my ISP doing something about it.
what would your ISP do?
When I left my apartment back in 2018, I was switching the Comcast account over to my housemate who was staying on there. In doing so I discovered I had a myname2342@comcast.com email account. The UI showed something like 8,000 unread emails. Bemused, I opened it to see what kind of spam it had accumulated. None at all! It was just under 8,000 DMCA / torrent warning emails from Comcast itself. "We know you torrented The.Pokemon.Movie.2001.h264.mkv, you better stop that!"
A full year of these emails and nothing more than that ever happened.
(if you're wondering how I hit 8000 torrents, the answer is individual album torrents)
I love coming to these threads to read the pearl clutching of "technologists" who suddenly care about IP and copyright law.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
I have absolutely no idea why you’re being downvoted. This feels like exactly the sort of project that would be backed by the current Russian administration, given it serves to damage and destabilise businesses in countries that are currently hostile to Russia. — it’s not even a controversial take to say so.
Was Obama funding Aaron Swartz's efforts to scrape JSTOR?
Some people have the personality trait of loving to build collections or archives. Either for idealistic reasons (knowledge deserves to be free) or just because it's fun.
When that personality trait intersects with technical ability, we get projects such as the Internet Archive, Archive Team, Library Genesis, etc. There is no reason to assume state sponsorship, and 2/3 of those definitely aren't state sponsored.
Why... does Putin like music more than the next guy?
Why would you want to destroy your enemies' industries, is what you're asking?
Although I suppose that is predicated on seeing Russia as the enemy. Strangely not always the norm these days in the new world.
> Why would you want to destroy your enemies' industries, is what you're asking?
Do you have any evidence that pirating is destroying industries? My guess is I can find the majority of this release by anna's archive on some combination of the pirate bay and the soulseek, or private music trackers. And yet, Spotify is still a thriving company, as is the entire music industry as a whole. There's even room for competing streaming services like Tidal and Youtube Music.
Then why would Anna's Archive also release archives of some of the largest Chinese publishers? Surely Putin wouldn't want to destroy China's industries.
Anna's Archive is not communist. You may be confusing them with SciHub.
I was - thank you.
Source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220301004131/https://sci-hub.r...
> Alexandra Elbakyan: Why Stalin is a God
The rest of my comment still stands.
Out of curiosity, where does Anna's Archive claim "communism" as a motivation?
[flagged]
[flagged]
The people I know who go through the trouble of pirating and downloading vast libraries of music are all musicians themselves, or at the very least total music nerds. They don’t want to lose access to their stuff, plus if they ever need to import audio into a DAW, DRM is a no-go. They are the same people who spend large amounts of money on vinyls, and support smaller independent artists through concerts, merch and (back in the day) CDs.
It used to be more mixed, but today, piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.
> piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but I find that nowadays the process of buying high-quality, DRM-free MP3 music is as simple and straightforward as it can be: you purchase the files (on Bandcamp, Amazon, Apple Music, etc.), download them legally, and then physically own them forever.
By the way, when purchasing through Bandcamp, 80+% goes to the artist (https://bandcamp.com/fair_trade_music_policy). So not only do you own the music, but you also make sure the artist is properly paid for their work.
> Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here
Nope, you are just more informed than me, thanks for the correction. I was extrapolating based on general trends in all forms of media (like games and movies too). It would be interesting to know what ratio of music can be acquired DRM free today.
The musicians I know are the most inclined to actually pay for music (NOT through Spotify) and buy merch.
It's both. Musicians and music nerds buy CDs and LPs and tapes and Bandcamp files and they "pirate" music both because they care about ownership and quality and rare or substantially different editions of records that aren't available legally, and because they've seen the sausage factory from the inside and know that "stealing" $0.02 from an artist who's starving like them anyway isn't really that far up on the list of heinous crimes. Buy the shirt, download the album. No one cares.
Music piracy is already a thing, not to mention you don't even need to torrent nowadays when music is available for free on YouTube. Those who don't want to pay already don't pay so nothing changes there.
The value of Spotify is the convenience, and this collection does not change that in any way. Your argument would apply if someone were to make a Spotify clone with the same UX using this data.
At least pirates provide some value from curation usually. In this case the leak is just all of Spotify. It makes it really easy for a competitor to just duplicate the Spotify service without paying licensing fees. Tbd what happens.
As soon as a competitor duplicates Spotify they’ll pay licensing fees or they’ll be pretty quickly shut down. You don’t get a free pass to stream music to people just because you happen to have the file.
Spotify itself started with pirated music.
I don’t understand how the parent comment is downvoted yet this is not. “Stealing is ok because stealing is already a thing”… come on, now
Because it's not stealing. Stealing is a problem because it deprives the original owner of the item - whether the thief subsequently uses the item or not doesn't change that.
This doesn't apply to dematerialized content: the original copy still exists. The only negative impact occurs if someone decides to actually use the pirated copy in place of buying a licensed one.
The mere existence of this new pirate copy being around doesn't automatically imply that, especially if other, more convenient sources are available.
Okay, call it copyright infringement then if you want to be a stickler on definitions. It's still wrong and existing instances of it doesn't make it justifiable to do.
Why is copyright infringement wrong?
Copying is not theft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
The idea is that the streamers and major labels cannot be trusted to keep this available for future generations, so if we want to preserve our shared culture we should take matters into our own hands.
I think the negatives for artists are minimal while the benefits of preserving a annotated snapshot of contemporary music for future generations is very valuable.
Don't worry, they let Spotify keep the original files.
Spotify can shut down any day. Even if it survives, it's removing content all the time. How are future generations supposed to study and listen to music if it is lost? Imho, someone has to do it.
Nobody is gonna download a 300TB torrent just to get the latest Taylor Swift album. There are much easier avenues than that.
What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.
Buy CDs. Use Bandcamp.
> What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.
My spotify wrapped says I listened for 50,000 minutes this year. Assuming 2 minutes per song, that's 25,000 streams. I paid them $110, aka $0.004/stream. Assuming I'm a typical user, they obviously could not afford to pay any more than that per stream.
I googled "spotify pay per listen" and the first result is a reddit comment saying "The average payout on Spotify is only $0.004 per stream." The google AI overview says "Spotify [..] pays artists a fraction of a cent, typically $0.003 to $0.005 per stream". So I'll assume it's something in that ballpark.
So it seems like Spotify's payouts are completely reasonable, given their pricing. Is my logic wrong somewhere?
That’s a fun math. I just checked mine: 96000 minutes. 2 minutes per song is way too generous as an assumption, for me everything seems to be > 3 minutes so ~20000 streams.
I’m paying for a family account (that’s around 250/year) and there are 5 people on it so my usage is 1/5th of that (50/year)
So that’s 0.0025€ per stream. I don’t think your assumption is unreasonable.
I suppose it depends on what the mean listening time is. I suspect the kind of person who comments on a discussion about music would listen more.
> Nobody is gonna download a 300TB torrent just to get the latest Taylor Swift album
Well, no. They'll just select the album download it selectively from the torrent.
No but the rip is a perfect tool for bad actors to profit from the music without paying licensing fees
> What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.
I'm pretty sure it's waaaay lower than that per 1000 streams.
It's not. What makes you say this?
How about we let the individual artists decide?
In most cases, they couldn't make that decision even if they wanted to. Only independent artists and those that are so large as to have enough sway (Niel Young for example) would be able to. The vast majority of artists you probably listen to don't actually own the rights to their own music.
So let the rights holders make the decision? They would never. Music rights exist for them to extract profit above all else. They don't care about preserving culture or legacy. Which is why it's important that somebody does.
Did they get to decide when their music was pirated and sold originally by Daniel Ek?
Stealing is not the correct word.
Why is this stealing? You can already listen to everything that's on Spotify with a free account. You are free to also record the audio while it's playing. I suppose grabbing the actual file should't matter? Or is this about releasing? And robbing people of plays they would otherwise get through Spotify?
If you listen to something on Spotify with a free account the artists still get paid. This isn't a case where you're ripping off so mega-corp. You're ripping off thousands of artists from major label ones to tiny indies. Take the metadata and build something cool. Stealing the files and releasing them is something else entirely.
You can record what you play from Spotify and you are already free to play the record again and again and again without the artist being paid.
Most people do not because they find it less convenient than paying 20bucks a month or whatever is the current price in 2025 but that doesn't change the reality.
For most people the appeal of Spotify is not the music itself but the playlists that are shared thanks to its ubiquity. This is the reason other services struggle to make a dent even if they have better quality, UI and algos.
Spotify started by disrupting the market using pirated music by the way so you are pretty much endorsing and encouraging piracy when "paying" your favorite artists through Spotify.
> with a free account the artists still get paid
Unless they're international stars, not really. It's peanuts these days. https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/13djsl9/how_much_d...
> Why is this stealing?
It's not, theft involves taking something from someone, i.e. also depriving them of that thing.
This may be unauthorised copying aka piracy, but it's not theft.
Downloading it all in bulk is different than personal usage. Its like ai companies hoovering up everything.
Spotify used pirated songs initially when they started it. So...
While I wouldn't call this scummy I do agree with your sentiment. It is technically stealing and those copyrights should be respected.
Full disclosure, I am a career musician AND have been known to pirate material. That said, I think this is a valuable archive to build. There are a lot of recordings that will not endure without some kind of archiving. So while it's not a perfect solution, I do think it has an important role to play in preservation for future generations.
Perhaps it's best to have a light barrier to entry. Something like "Yes, you can listen to these records, but it should be in the spirit of requesting the material for review, and not just as a no-pay alternative to listening on Spotify." Give it just enough friction where people would rather pay the $12/month to use a streaming service.
Also, it's not like streaming services are a lucrative source of income for most artists. I expect the small amount of revenue lost to listeners of Anna's Archive are just (fractions of) a penny in the bucket of any income that a serious artist would stand to make.
> It is technically stealing
It is technically not. Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not. You can’t steal a copyright (aside from something like breaking into your stuff and stealing the proof that you hold the copyright), and then a song is downloaded the original copyright holder still have copy.
Calling piracy theft was MPAA/RIAA propaganda. Now people say that piracy is theft without ever even questioning it, so it was quite successful.
> Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not.
that seems like an overly narrow definition… what about identity theft, or IP theft?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/superseding-indictment-...
See my other comment. Identity theft is the bank being defrauded and passing the problem onto you. They are the victim, not you and it is their money that’s gone, not yours.
IP theft is more like espionage and possibly lost hypothetical revenue. Again, it isn’t larceny, burglary, etc. You still have the knowledge, it’s just that so does the perpetrator.
Moreover discussions of IP gets into whether it even makes sense to be able to patent algorithms which are at their core just mathematics. So before you can talk about stealing the quadratic formula you need to prove that the quadratic formula is something that can be property.
Mitchell & Webb's take on "identity theft" is worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
You may not be stealing the actual content, more so “making a copy”, but in doing that you’re taking away money the artist would have earned if you bought their album or streamed it on Spotify (admittedly that’a a very small amount for the artist but that’s another thing)
And if I stole something physical you had for sale, you wouldn’t make the money, so the end result is effectively the same.
The “if you bought their album” is the non-trivial part of that sentence. A pirate is not necessarily going to fork over $20 for an album if they couldn’t pirate. Chances are they will simply not buy the album. In either case the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 (6% to the artist the rest to the studio and distributors). So the result is really not the same because the artist and the pirate can both have the album in different ways and in both cases the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 unlike a physical good which cannot be cloned.
What this really is exposing is that most art is not worth the same. A Taylor Swift album is not worth the same on the open market as a Joe Exotic album. Pricing both at say $20 is artificial. Realistically most music has near zero actual value, hence why if you are a B tier or lower artist you won’t make much compared to an A tier artist on platforms like Spotify or YouTube which pay per listen/watch.
Can you post your social security number and other personal info here then? You will still have it afterwards!
Oh also, I don't see why I should ever pay for trains or movie tickets if there are seats available. I can just walk in! The event will happen anyway. Its not stealing.
Everyone should just download all art, music and literature for free. Musicians, artists and writers can all make money some other way while I enjoy the works of their efforts.
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/images/straw-man-arguments
What the music/movie industry was claiming in court was not theft. There is no statute that identifies piracy as theft. They were claiming copyright violation and wanted to collect damages for lost revenue.
You are bringing up “identity theft” which is also not theft. If you post your PII here and I use it to open a credit card in your name and then spend a bunch of the money using that card on buying goods and services, you are not the victim. What I do in that case is defraud the bank. They are the ones who are the actual victim and in the ideal world they would be the ones working with the authorities to get their money back.
Of course they would rather not do that so they invented a crime called identity theft and convinced everyone that it is ok for them to make you the victim. They make your life hell since they can’t find the actual criminal while you spend thousands of dollars trying to prove that you don’t owe thousands of dollars. But in reality you were not any part of the fraud. It is on the bank to secure their system enough to prevent this. But they have big time lawyer money and you don’t so here you are.
Hey, you should look up how Spotify got started. :)
Ageee with you, this release is obviously a scummy thing to do.
Same as if someone released every book on Kindle for free. There are rules. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.
Not to mention the organization is openly trying to profit from this data by selling it to big tech orgs for AI training! None of the artists consented to that, I am sure, to say nothing if Spotify's interests.
On top of that they beg for donations.
You don't think that would be a good thing?
Everyone should just download all art, music and literature for free. Musicians, artists and writers can all make money some other way while I enjoy the works of their efforts.
Unironically yes?
Many artists already work this way. They are on Spotify et al. for reach not because it does anything meaningful for them financially. It’s not like your subscription fee is distributed fairly to the artists you listen to anyway[0].
To the extent they make money at all, it’s from touring, and selling physical media and merch.
The world under Spotify is about as financially bad for most artists as if everyone was pirating away.
If we all quit Spotify, pirated everything, and spent the money we saved buying things from the artists we were enjoying the most (from their own sites, Bandcamp, or at concerts), the artists and musicians would be much better off.
[0] Unless you only listen to the big stars who end up getting most of the payouts.
My wife is in her 40s, doesn't tour anymore, and makes a good chunk of her income from spotify.
Yuck. Just to make it easier to train slop machines. The point of art is not to have completionist archives of EVERYthing that’s ever been made! Let it die. Death is the most natural part of life. Art is about the human experience, not “for researchers”.
The point is human connection. Art is a living reflection and record of human experience. Art will persevere- the kinds of folks who prioritize what they like based on popularity were never the supporters artists (contrast with craftspeople trying to make a buck) counted on in the first place. Enjoy your derivative slop - we’ll continue on our imperfect, messy, individual, human artistic lives.
I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?
do you mean that researchers should be disallowed from accessing art?
I do not see how research interferes with all the benefits you prioritise. Can't you continue to enjoy those benefits?
Many people think 'real' music has electric guitars. I think they're wrong, but why argue with them? I think it's fine if you do not like music made from music, but that ship sailed last century. One detail you may be missing is that there are imperfect messy individual artistic humans who make music from music too. Computers are no more an obstacle to human connection through music than electric guitars are.
> I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?
Don't talk to people like here, please. It's passive aggressive and unproductive. GP's comment was fine, if not a bit impassioned, regardless if you agree with it.
thanks for the correction, I do not want to be aggressive.
I see now I should have just asked: what do you want?
to prefix my response with an admission that I'm not sure what the problem is.
Unlike books, which are massively overpriced, this will hurt artists a lot as they need the fees paid by Spotify to make ends meet.
I don't think so. Streaming services are used for convenience. Torrenting and managing music at this scale is inconvenient.
Distributing these huge torrents is the perfect way to avoid any real damage to artists while being invaluable to preservation of culture.
> this will hurt artists a lot as they need the fees paid by Spotify to make ends meet.
Anyone using DRM/paracopyright to "make their ends meet" deserves what they get. This is de facto theft from the public domain.
I hate spotify as a company but I agree, at least in my case, a large share of my wife's income comes from spotify.