[HN Gopher] Backing up Spotify
___________________________________________________________________
Backing up Spotify
Author : vitplister
Score : 1694 points
Date : 2025-12-20 18:28 UTC (1 days 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.
| rireads wrote:
| You must be the Spotify CEO, lol
| venturecruelty wrote:
| You're talking about Spotify, right? Famously started by ad
| execs pirating music and then selling it.
| 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 is
| it legal or illegal?
| layer8 wrote:
| Completely illegal.
| sneak wrote:
| The metadata scrape might not be.
| layer8 wrote:
| Pretty sure any kind of scraping violates Spotify's ToS.
| sneak wrote:
| ToS is not law except in the most draconian and
| authoritarian interpretations of the CFAA.
| layer8 wrote:
| You are mistaken, it's contract law.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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
| 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/
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Is it realtime?
| 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.
| timcobb wrote:
| > and a way to download that without my ISP doing something
| about it.
|
| what would your ISP do?
| komali2 wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| > 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.
| 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.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Did they get to decide when their music was pirated and
| sold originally by Daniel Ek?
| 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
| hbs18 wrote:
| > 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| paddim8 wrote:
| It's not. What makes you say this?
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| Why is copyright infringement wrong?
| 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| foresto wrote:
| Mitchell & Webb's take on "identity theft" is worth a
| listen.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
| 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.
| jotaen wrote:
| > 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.
| 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| 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.
| locusofself wrote:
| My wife is in her 40s, doesn't tour anymore, and makes a
| good chunk of her income from spotify.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| 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.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Hey, you should look up how Spotify got started. :)
| polytely wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| eterm wrote:
| It's hard to imagine anything but physical egress for that
| kind of volume.
| morsch wrote:
| 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.
| kefabean wrote:
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| True, but I could see them rate limiting that much more
| aggressively than streaming.
| sejje wrote:
| You can download playlists for offline use, it'll go
| pretty fast. I doubt they monitor it that hard.
| monerozcash wrote:
| You can probably just buy a thousand hacked spotify
| accounts for not much more than $1 a piece
| tacker2000 wrote:
| I would guess this can be hidden under normal music streaming
| activity? But one would need lots of proxies!
| monerozcash wrote:
| 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.
| alex_duf wrote:
| 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
| monerozcash wrote:
| 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.
| Thaxll wrote:
| 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.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Perhaps they leased a botnet.
| https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/10/aisuru-botnet-shifts-
| fro...
| derkades wrote:
| 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...
| KomoD wrote:
| Where the magic actually happens:
| https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
| reassess_blind wrote:
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Pretty sure that requirement is server-side?
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| KomoD wrote:
| 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)
| bambax wrote:
| "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?
| 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?
| MrGilbert wrote:
| 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.
| croemer wrote:
| 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.
| nurumaik wrote:
| I'd rather complain why somebody decides for me where what
| websites I'm allowed to open
| 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.
| 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 labs 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.
| amitav1 wrote:
| Yeah,how devstating it would be for _Anna 's Archive_ to
| be found skirting _copyright_ laws. Their reputation may
| never recover.
|
| \s
| hkt wrote:
| He meant the AI companies
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I mean, the same comment applies _mutatis mutandis_.
| ls612 wrote:
| I mean Facebook and Anthropic both torrented LibGen in
| its entirety.
| scratchyone wrote:
| I believe they're largely targeting foreign companies who
| don't care much about US copyright law.
| 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).
| lurk2 wrote:
| > 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > 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?
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| dagss wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| dagss wrote:
| 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.
| felixg3 wrote:
| ,,Shared delusion" - just another term for ,,social
| contract"?
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > 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.
| 0x3f wrote:
| > 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?
| klez wrote:
| > 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.
| 0x3f wrote:
| If we're purely talking about music then almost
| everything is on YouTube, which has a subscription cost
| of $0/mo.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > 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.
| 0x3f wrote:
| > 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.
| thisisabore wrote:
| 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.
| aqeelat wrote:
| This would work on niche segments and not for the masses.
| Look up YouTube subscribers to Pateon ratio.
| verisimi wrote:
| I agree completely. Parasites with money like to keep
| open the legal loopholes for their clever wheeze.
| dagss wrote:
| 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.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| 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.
| xmcp123 wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You have been able to _buy_ DRM free digital music from
| all of the record labels since 2009 from Apple and other
| stores.
| jMyles wrote:
| > 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
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| 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
| jdabney wrote:
| ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011.
| https://macosforge.github.io/alac/
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Wow. How did I miss that!!!
| whstl wrote:
| The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.app
| le....
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.ap
| ple
| lurk2 wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app -
| burn the song to a CD and rip it.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| You've been able to buy DRM free digital music since the
| 1980s.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Technically not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seria
| l_Copy_Management_System
| rob74 wrote:
| I think OP was referring to CDs, which AFAIK don't have
| DRM.
| saubeidl wrote:
| My link is to the CD DRM!
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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.
| mirashii wrote:
| Unless the CD comes with a root kit that interferes with
| that copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy
| _protection_rootk...
| lmm wrote:
| 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?
| neobrain wrote:
| There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and
| 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I still buy DRM free music from Amazon.
| bpfrh wrote:
| Quboz, bandcamp, etc.
| accrual wrote:
| Bandcamp is still my go to for owning music. Nice
| platform, just works.
| bradleybuda wrote:
| "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.
| irilesscent wrote:
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| Piracy went down quite a bit since that is possible.
| potatoicecoffee wrote:
| they made cd singles and single song purchases long
| before streaming
| hamdingers wrote:
| Do you have evidence they are profiting? I'm genuinely
| curious how these kinds of archives sustain themselves.
| djeastm wrote:
| They take donations.
| cwnyth wrote:
| Just to nitpick, that doesn't imply profit. They could be
| breaking even (and probably are working at a loss).
| lurk2 wrote:
| 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.
| emaro wrote:
| I admit the irony, but also funny reminder that Spotify
| started with a pirated catalogue back on the day.
| onion2k wrote:
| _You go where the money is._
|
| That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated
| unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| 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!
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Who cares, today is pretty easy to be part of a botnet.
| Having a slightly outdated lightbulb qualifies, so I'd not
| bother.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Nope, many IoT devices open ports via UPnP. The biggest
| botnets are composed of (among other things) smart plugs,
| baby monitors, doorbells, IP cameras...
| sneak wrote:
| They're doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for
| AI companies.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > 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.
| varenc wrote:
| 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.
| tsukikage wrote:
| 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.
| hnben wrote:
| how are some tracks more profitable to spotify than
| others?
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| 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-...
| gorbachev wrote:
| 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.
| figmert wrote:
| Barely all. I have so many songs in my playlist that has
| randomly become unavailable. It's quite frustrating to be
| honest.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| silcoon wrote:
| > 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.
| avoutos wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| silcoon wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The desire to create something does not seem like an
| immutable characteristic.
| v9v wrote:
| Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?
| nani8ot wrote:
| 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.
| moritzruth wrote:
| > 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.
| lukifer wrote:
| "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.)
| ptero wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| > 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.
| frm88 wrote:
| _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.
| delusional wrote:
| > 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| > 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.
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| > 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.
| codersfocus wrote:
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| It's obviously more profitable to pay the fine than to
| not do the illegal thing in the first place, so I am
| correct.
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Helps train an algorithm to figure out which music is
| popular, as a training signal
| skrtskrt wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| 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...
| justatdotin wrote:
| I would expect more data to make ai music generation better
| cakealert wrote:
| When they say "worse" they do mean the AI will get better
| which will be worse because they are ideologically opposed
| to AI.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| jen729w wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Then why do you say they might not be the same files?
| sgtlaggy wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| 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?
| injidup wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| (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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was
| licensed by the time customers started paying for it.
| ninjin wrote:
| Correct, the pirated music library was _before_ they
| exited the closed Alpha.
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
| ninjin wrote:
| 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.
| grvbck wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| > 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.
| anjel wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| cj wrote:
| Some quick Googling shows 1 million streams pays approx
| $2000.
|
| You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| a022311 wrote:
| The Pudding had a nice article explaining how streaming
| revenue is distributed:
| https://pudding.cool/2022/06/streaming/
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| You only need 5000 fans to buy your CD/album/w.e at $15
| to make 80k
| cm2012 wrote:
| Per year, which is a big lift compared to them pressing
| play on Spotify
| tayo42 wrote:
| Yeah but you need a quarter million people every week
| according to that guy. That will drop off over time.
| edelhans wrote:
| 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
| cwillu wrote:
| > 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.
| jMyles wrote:
| As a reasonably known but not super popular bluegrass
| artist, I agree: please steal my music instead of paying
| Spotify for it.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Hell, Weird Al himself only made $12 from Spotify views
| in 2023.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| To rights owners, not to artists. It's not a trivial
| difference. Ask Taylor Swift.
| earthnail wrote:
| Touring makes almost no money. Only concerts with >1000ppl
| make money. Below that you can assume not even the sound
| engineer gets paid.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| basisword wrote:
| Ah so you're only stealing a bit of money from the artists.
| That's ok then.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Weird Al pointed out in 2023 that his 80 million Spotify
| views that year netted him $12 - enough for a nice
| sandwich.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Spotify pays the rightsholders. What are they supposed to
| do about the shitty contracts that the artists signs with
| the labels?
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| 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
| Aldipower wrote:
| 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.
| cedws wrote:
| 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.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| 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
| tandr wrote:
| Spotify just (last week or 2 weeks ago) introduced lossless
| compression (FLAC) and it sounds amazing.
| cedws wrote:
| Wow didn't know about that, thanks.
| 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
| troupo wrote:
| 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.
| nimih wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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
| nsteel wrote:
| I thought they started producing their own podcasts. Can't
| bring in much though.
| troupo wrote:
| 260+ million songs they don't own vs a dozen or so
| podcasts
| nsteel wrote:
| 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.
| kasabali wrote:
| They also have fake artists they put on playlists :P
| LunaSea wrote:
| 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.
| sbarre wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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
| troupo wrote:
| > Spotify is banking on AI music
|
| Are they?
| LunaSea wrote:
| Yes, they actively promote playlists with AI music to
| corner the "chill work" music without having to pay
| anything to musicians.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of
| popular movies on their streaming service.
| kodt wrote:
| For their mail service they did
| troupo wrote:
| 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.
| 1dry wrote:
| 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.
| fao_ wrote:
| Spotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists
| you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who
| make music.
| nimih wrote:
| What, precisely, is the point you're trying to make here?
| 1dry wrote:
| 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.
| nimih wrote:
| 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.
| flir wrote:
| 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.
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| 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.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| 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)
| 1dry wrote:
| updated - thank you commenters for making it clear that my
| sentiment was not clear
| firefax wrote:
| >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.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > 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.
| layman51 wrote:
| Audio fingerprinting?
| firefax wrote:
| >Audio fingerprinting?
|
| Bought a spotify card with cash, email was registered on
| public wifi.
|
| Who cares? :-)
| dbalatero wrote:
| They'd probably do a shit job of capturing it?
| coppsilgold wrote:
| 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...
| yungwarlock wrote:
| Bro. Who cares. Ive got bunch of songs like this. The loss
| makes it more nostalgic
| firefax wrote:
| 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.
| hkt wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > 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?
| shevy-java wrote:
| > 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.)
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Just cite facebook getting busted training its AI on torrents
| proven to contain unlicensed material lol
| madduci wrote:
| 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
| ipsum2 wrote:
| They already have this data. See jukebox from OpenAI,
| released before chatgpt.
| gorbachev wrote:
| 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.
| zuspotirko 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.
|
| Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same
| problem with books?
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| I wonder how deep the hole they're gonna put whoever runs this
| site into is gonna be?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| alxndr wrote:
| FWIW archive.org has a lot of live music as well
| 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.
| some-guy wrote:
| 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.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Don't you consider it best to ... redact ... your post,
| as it's the only one mentioning it by name?
| fragmede wrote:
| Some people just don't know when to shut the hell up.
| sincerely wrote:
| It's hardly a secret, you can go on r/trackers where
| people discuss private trackers for every media type
| tclancy wrote:
| 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).
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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)
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| david_p wrote:
| Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old
| internet and would love to take a look.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| Narushia wrote:
| 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.
| david_p wrote:
| Thank you. I'm reading about them, cool project. I'll try
| to join.
| bgbntty2 wrote:
| 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.
| 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!
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| email me please
| sbarre wrote:
| > 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.
| 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
| platevoltage wrote:
| 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.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| The amount of extremely obscure music on there is crazy,
| stuff that exists nowhere else in the internet except
| maybe google drive links.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| Yeah, I was looking for some rare album I had in the
| past, and was shocked to realize that Soulseek is still
| active.
| tclancy wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| b8 wrote:
| Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.
| WadeGrimridge wrote:
| anna's rip has ~86m tracks, not ~186. ~186m is metadata,
| specifically ISRCs.
| rldjbpin wrote:
| 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.
| laughingcurve wrote:
| Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories!
| OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical
| community
| 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.
| klysm wrote:
| I play piano and don't mind playing in Db at all. The
| chords fit nicely in the hands
| 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?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| RickyLahey wrote:
| 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)
| 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...
| zanderz wrote:
| 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
| johanyc wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| justatdotin wrote:
| 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.
| DUDOS wrote:
| 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?
| veeti wrote:
| 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.
| woile wrote:
| 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.
| rasmus-kirk wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| 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.
| davsti4 wrote:
| 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.
| RGamma wrote:
| Since relatively recently I'm getting AI music in my
| automatic radio. They look/sound like soulless facsimiles of
| the real thing.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Why haven't you unsubscribed then?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| 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.
| sbarre wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| dmicah wrote:
| 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.
| DrammBA wrote:
| 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.
| emsixteen wrote:
| The cost of rest of the hardware, running it constantly, and
| 'admin' overheads aren't to be scoffed at to be fair.
| 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.
| hn111 wrote:
| This works nicely: https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.)
| emsixteen wrote:
| I worry about potential bans from scraping files through this
| sort of thing.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| Eckter2 wrote:
| 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.
| emsixteen wrote:
| 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.
| 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/
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Thanks for linking that page, interesting rabbit hole that I
| hadn't heard about until today...
| 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
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| "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.
| computergert wrote:
| 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.
| 47282847 wrote:
| 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.
| flexagoon wrote:
| > They are based in russia.
|
| Are you sure? I don't think they are, from what I've seen
| xandrius wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| I hope they get the new lossless versions
| 1dry wrote:
| 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.
| justatdotin wrote:
| 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.
| junon wrote:
| > 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.
| justatdotin wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 199GB, only metadata released for now.
|
| Magnet link found here: https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify
|
| Are magnet links allowed on HN?
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| For some reason, the link does not work for me (spain). Works
| perfect at the same time in tor browser.
| mvkel wrote:
| 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.
| msephton wrote:
| Is this all regions? I'm assuming so but I can't be sure
| walthamstow wrote:
| Very interesting that a white noise track for babies is the 4th
| most popular track on Spotify.
| cluckindan wrote:
| 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.
| zarzavat wrote:
| White noise isn't copyrightable.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Then how is silence copyrightable?
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| junon wrote:
| It's not odd if you aren't the type who frequents hacker
| news. We are, after all, very much in a bubble here.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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
| virtualritz wrote:
| 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.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| 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?
| ticoombs wrote:
| 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
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Very interesting. The security page does show up on kagi at
| #6.
|
| I wonder if GitHub flags it to not be indexed or something.
| Mythli wrote:
| Try Yandex search, trust me later.
|
| It has 0 censorship - regarding pirated content at least.
| junon wrote:
| Was also shocked to see that (Berlin, Telekom here).
| oarfish wrote:
| 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.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| Pretty sure this was a thing in the past, but that currently
| it has to be a court order.
| croemer wrote:
| 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...
| grumbelbart wrote:
| 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.
| polytely wrote:
| Also true in the Netherlands, I hate these copyright freaks
| constantly trying to restrict access.
| sva_ wrote:
| They also block some foreign "news" like Russia Today last time
| I checked.
| 63 wrote:
| 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.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| They can't be touched by the music industry they're based in
| Russia.
| lysace wrote:
| This reinforces my belief that this effort ("anna's...") is
| financially backed by Russia/Putin. The HN crowd probably won't
| see it though.
|
| Think from a geopolitical perspective, not (just) a "copyright
| shouldn't exist" perspective. They claim "communism" as a
| motivation; Putin is looking to re-establish the Stalin Soviet
| Union.
| BrokenCogs wrote:
| Why... does Putin like music more than the next guy?
| lysace wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| flexagoon wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Out of curiosity, where does Anna's Archive claim "communism"
| as a motivation?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| 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.
| zarzavat wrote:
| 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.
| flexagoon wrote:
| Anna's Archive is not communist. You may be confusing them with
| SciHub.
| lysace wrote:
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| 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.
| snoozebutton wrote:
| is this not highly illegal?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| 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?
| ZeWaka wrote:
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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?
| gyrgtyn wrote:
| 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| flexagoon wrote:
| "Partial downloads" in the context of torrenting usually
| refers to downloading specific files from a torrent
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| 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.
| markstos wrote:
| > >=70% of songs are ones almost no one ever listens to (stream
| count < 1000).
|
| So much interesting but undiscovered music is out there!
| halperter wrote:
| 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.
| junon wrote:
| 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.
| rendaw wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| captbaritone wrote:
| 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.
| gorbachev wrote:
| My guess is a large portion of the psytrance music is slop,
| whether AI or some other form of auto-generation.
| Uninen wrote:
| I hope someone builds an open API around this metadata. I'd love
| to have alternatives to the big player APIs.
| meysamazad wrote:
| I wonder if Spotify will pursue any legal actions to take this
| archive or the site down!
| userbinator wrote:
| _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".
| reassess_blind wrote:
| Same model and same prompt won't necessarily create the same
| result, unless I misunderstand how these audio models work.
| squigz wrote:
| It's possible to generate the same images and text from LMs
| by tweaking the settings, right? Are audio models different?
| Philpax wrote:
| 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...
| shomp wrote:
| If only Spotify paid musicians their fair share
| m00dy wrote:
| Congrats! I'm sure the Spotify lawyers are gonna have some
| sleepless nights ahead.
| djfergus wrote:
| 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)
| reassess_blind wrote:
| "Good luck, we don't care." is their stance, as far as I can
| tell.
| pmdr wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| 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.
| BaudouinVH wrote:
| error 451 https://postimg.cc/QFddnW41
| linhns wrote:
| Unlike books, which are massively overpriced, this will hurt
| artists a lot as they need the fees paid by Spotify to make ends
| meet.
| Stagnant wrote:
| 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.
| locusofself wrote:
| 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.
| thih9 wrote:
| This is conspiracy theory territory but I wonder if big tech is
| sponsoring efforts like this as an easy way to get training data.
| dbacar wrote:
| Now, anyone with some decent info on signal processing and
| machine learning can build his/her own Shazam.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes, but do they have the one that goes like: to-to-to dotodoo?
| Hmmm? Do they?
| gorbachev wrote:
| 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.
| 47282847 wrote:
| > 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
| aerozol wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| 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 :)
| gorbachev wrote:
| 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.
| Kerollmops wrote:
| 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.
| 7ero wrote:
| free the music
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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.
| romanovcode wrote:
| `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.
| Philpax wrote:
| spotdl downloads from YouTube, not Spotify, afaik
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| 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.
| simmo9000 wrote:
| We need insane for culture to survive.
| gverrilla wrote:
| GREAT DAY
| Aldipower wrote:
| Oh, just noticed my provider "Vodafone Germany" is blocking the
| domain annas-archive.li on DNS level.
| xandrius wrote:
| 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
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| yoan9224 wrote:
| 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.
| Yeri wrote:
| wow. Blocked in Belgium.
|
| Error HTTP 451 - Unavailable For Legal Reasons
|
| https://lumendatabase.org/notices/71398835
| hmokiguess wrote:
| What an early christmas gift for humanity. Now, asking for a
| friend, what's the ideal setup for torrenting this? Mullvad /
| Tailscale?
| nmz wrote:
| This might be the perfect time to do archiving before the entire
| internet gets inundated by sub-par AI generated content.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| 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?
| bguberfain wrote:
| We can finally search for playlists with a giving song! A basic
| feature that Spotify is missing!
| RickyLahey wrote:
| This will be great to train AI on.
| shmerl wrote:
| Just buy music DRM-free in the first place.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| >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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| https://annas-archive.li/llm
| rldjbpin wrote:
| 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*.
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