[HN Gopher] Backing Up Spotify
___________________________________________________________________
Backing Up Spotify
Author : vitplister
Score : 486 points
Date : 2025-12-20 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annas-archive.li)
(TXT) w3m dump (annas-archive.li)
| lelouch9099 wrote:
| How legal is this with regards to copyright laws?
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| Not legal
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| There's some irony here considering Spotify used pirated mp3s
| at the start of their operations, I suppose.
| poly2it wrote:
| 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.
| jopicornell wrote:
| 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...).
| conception wrote:
| Are you talking about Spotify here...?
| chrneu wrote:
| lol is this comedy? Cuz it's absolutely hilarious opposite
| humor.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Not legal. This group does not concern themselves with
| copyright law.
| chrneu wrote:
| they do concern themselves with it, but in a "calling it out
| for being shit" kind of way.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Adherence to the legal framework is a function of your risk
| appetite.
| ronsor wrote:
| Very, if we delete copyright like we're supposed to.
| luke-stanley wrote:
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| Completely illegal.
| sneak wrote:
| The metadata scrape might not be.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Wow. Anna is a godsend. Hopefully now we get some really good
| open source music models
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| First we need good stem splitting
| artninja1988 wrote:
| What do you think about the recent SAM audio model by meta?
| https://ai.meta.com/blog/sam-audio/
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Wow. Now I just need some hard drives and a way to download that
| without my ISP doing something about it. That's amazing.
| basisword wrote:
| Am I understanding this wrong? Ripping the metadata I'm fine
| with. But it sounds like they've ripped every song from Spotify
| and they're going to release them?
|
| Edit: It seems like they are. Stealing from tens of thousands of
| artists, big and small, and calling it "preservation" or
| "archiving" is scummy.
| efilife wrote:
| 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?
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| > 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/commen
| ts/13djsl9/how_much_d...
| cm2012 wrote:
| Downloading it all in bulk is different than personal usage.
| Its like ai companies hoovering up everything.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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.
| basisword wrote:
| How about we let the individual artists decide?
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > 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?
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| 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 0.0025EUR per stream. I don't think your
| assumption is unreasonable.
| Gander5739 wrote:
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| No but the rip is a perfect tool for bad actors to profit
| from the music without paying licensing fees
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| montag wrote:
| 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
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Copying is not theft.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| > 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| uhfraid wrote:
| > 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-...
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| tripdout wrote:
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Stealing is not the correct word.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Don't worry, they let Spotify keep the original files.
| klabb3 wrote:
| 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.
| temp0826 wrote:
| The musicians I know are the most inclined to actually pay
| for music (NOT through Spotify) and buy merch.
| einr wrote:
| 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.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| Spotify used pirated songs initially when they started it.
| So...
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| You don't think that would be a good thing?
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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!
| bmikaili wrote:
| they're probably just using something like
| https://github.com/nor-dee/spotizerr-spotify
| WD-42 wrote:
| No way, that would take far too long.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Probably not, those tools don't actually download Spotify
| tracks at source quality.
| sunaookami wrote:
| 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.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Sadly since zspotify was killed I don't know of any
| remaining tools.
| spatterl1ght wrote:
| votify
| DUDOS wrote:
| How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining
| anonymous is also astonishing.
| frereubu wrote:
| Site is down for me. Archive link: https://archive.is/jf3HW
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Ironic. But its working for me.
| mawax wrote:
| Probably not down, but blocked by your ISP. Try a VPN. Same
| thing happens here.
| lukan wrote:
| 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?
| xnx wrote:
| Merry Christmas!
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| 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.
| 5- wrote:
| > _The Anna's archive group is ideologically motivated.
| They're definitely not doing this for AI companies._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
| ronsor wrote:
| They know about AI companies and don't mind AI companies,
| but they're not doing it because AI companies.
| jsheard wrote:
| > 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 piracy-maxxing.
| j_w wrote:
| 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.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| 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.
| gmueckl wrote:
| But then you have a money trail connecting the company
| unambiguously to copyright violations on a scale that is
| arguably larger than Napster.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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).
| cryzinger wrote:
| > 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!
| sneak wrote:
| They're doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for
| AI companies.
| basisword wrote:
| >> 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.
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| 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.
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| The metadata is probably more useful than the music files
| themselves arguably
| cm2012 wrote:
| Especially since they scraped Spotify's popularity rating as
| well
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| ale42 wrote:
| 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).
| Mindwipe wrote:
| YouTube Music uses Widevine.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| If it's on YouTube Music, it's also on... YouTube.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Not necessarily at the same quality though.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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)
| charcircuit wrote:
| You can load any youtube music song on youtube by just
| removing the "music" subdomain.
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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.
| nsteel wrote:
| 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-...
| stefan_ wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| >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.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Notably 160kbit is the free-tier bitrate, so they
| presumably used unpaid accounts.
| cm2012 wrote:
| This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will
| resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the
| artists.
| lkramer wrote:
| Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So
| nothing has changed.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| nospice wrote:
| > 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.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?
| thiht wrote:
| > 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| I wonder how deep the hole they're gonna put whoever runs this
| site into is gonna be?
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| 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.
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| leetbulb wrote:
| Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special
| place in my heart.
| some-guy wrote:
| 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.
| selectodude wrote:
| 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.
| flxy wrote:
| 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.
| some-guy wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| the compilation album is a great idea. thanks for that.
| your comments in here have been helpful. have fun
| listening.
| girvo wrote:
| 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!
| rckclmbr wrote:
| 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
| SSLy wrote:
| I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk
| chrneu wrote:
| >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.)
| SSLy wrote:
| Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current
| spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| syntaxing wrote:
| 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.
| robotbikes wrote:
| This already exists and is interesting to play around with -
| https://github.com/ASLP-lab/DiffRhythm
| ipsum2 wrote:
| 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.
| ruuda wrote:
| 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.
| klysm wrote:
| Difficult to play in what instrument?
| yurishimo wrote:
| 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.
| ghostie_plz wrote:
| 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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?
| Fizzadar wrote:
| 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.
| yegle wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| Yeah we shouldn't. But we may.
| nness wrote:
| a la "Popcorn Time."
| uhfraid wrote:
| spotify used to do just that (stream p2p) until 2014 or so
|
| https://www.scribd.com/document/56651812/kreitz-spotify-kth1...
| willio58 wrote:
| 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.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| 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.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Is the music torrent not up yet? Only see the metadata one here:
| https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify
| artninja1988 wrote:
| 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)
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Oh I see, thanks! I missed that
| vlaaad wrote:
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| 827a wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Wasn't all data available to users though?
| cm2012 wrote:
| Yes but very hard to scrape in bulk from user accounts
| potwinkle wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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?
| krick wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| 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
| :)
| killingtime74 wrote:
| You can download torrents selectively. I think if they adopted
| that cautious attitude they wouldn't exist in the first place
| Gander5739 wrote:
| 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.
| krick wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| I have a Supermicro 24 bay 2U in my house with an array
| around half that size in it. It's not prohibitive.
| ikamm wrote:
| 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.
| zzzeek wrote:
| 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.
| frytaped wrote:
| 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.
| siquick wrote:
| Is there a way to see the shape of the metadata?
| krackers wrote:
| New multimodal training set just dropped.
| tjoff wrote:
| 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.
| lelandfe wrote:
| 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!
| Spivak wrote:
| Not that using the Spotify API directly is all that hard but
| the spotipy library makes it even easier.
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| Amazing! I wonder if the Every Noise At Once[1] site could be
| updated with the metadata from this?
|
| [1] https://everynoise.com/
| reactordev wrote:
| Oh this is going to go over real well in Nashville, TN.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| 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
| tristanc wrote:
| 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!
| tolerance wrote:
| I am not enthused by this news. Let us entertain the possibility
| that similar institutions will eschew this catalog.
| 47282847 wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| I hope they get the new lossless versions
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