cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/7719730
cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/7719728
Here it is: https://annas-archive.org/blog/backing-up-spotify.html
Download all existing literature to build a library for preservation and you’re called a pirate. Download all existing literature from aforementioned library to train an LLM and you’re a tech innovator. What a strange world we live in.
Download all existing literature to build a library for preservation and you’re called a pirate.
Said library contains petabytes of the exact text of each and every piece of literature.
Download all existing literature from aforementioned library to train an LLM and you’re a tech innovator.
Said model contains gigabytes of a bunch of weights that can never go back to the exact words of the book.
What a strange world we live in.
It’s not strange at all. It’s degrees of compression. You compress a JPEG to the point that it’s unrecognizable, and it’s no longer breaking copyright. It’s essentially like trying to write a book you just read based on memory.
so you’re saying degrading quality while getting filthy rich by stealing everyone else’s work is better than archival efforts? not sure what your point is.
His point is basically that if you remove every 5th word of a book it’s legal to hoard as it’s compressed.
It is but it be very hard to
However, these existing efforts have some major issues:
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.
Later…
We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
I must be kinda stupid, but it sounds to me like there’s some double speak. “Only popular music gets preserved, so we preserved music by popularity”
It’d probably be more beneficial to read the article directly from Anna’s Archive where they display plenty of graphs and infographics to make the data understandable. Unfortunately this article has none of that. The “over-focus on popular artists” is quite literally meaning they’re only missing artists who aren’t being listened to, most of which are probably AI anyway.
https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html
To be fair, the 10k is just a sample. The true amount is 86 million, about a quarter of all Spotify songs.
Put another way, for any random song a person listens to, there is a 99.6% likelihood that it is part of the archive. We expect this number to be higher if you filter to only human-created songs. Do remember though that the error bar on listens for popularity 0 is large.
For popularity=0, we ordered tracks by a secondary importance metric based on artist followers and album popularity, and fetched in descending order.
We have stopped here due to the long tail end with diminishing returns (700TB+ additional storage for minor benefit), as well as the bad quality of songs with popularity=0 (many AI generated, hard to filter).
Also it sounds like they had difficulty scraping some of the less popular songs and got them from somewhere else.
This is a good thing honestly, fuck Spotify it ruined music as much as any single company/service could.
As an artist I’m very happy to see my work archived in there. Any suggestions where I can submit my music directly to archives.
I don’t know about Anna’s Archive but I suggest uploading it to Internet Archive.
You could provide a torrent of it directly.
want the link just so i can know how to avoid it i’m a good girl who does’t steal totally.
You forgot to administer head pats
trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000’s of tracks each sounds horrible, Meta data and tracks and located in different areas. Audio is reencoded to OGG Opus.
For this to be useful for me I would have to spend about $6000 on hard drives (20/terabyte X 300 TB), than convert the files to MP3, and somehow rename the files to their original songs and artists and create appropriate directories.
Do not think this is practical.
Or stop being an idiot and consider using self-hosted media solutions that handle the metadata for you. Like Plex, Jellyfin, or any of the roughly three dozen options here.
The right torrent client will also allow you to pick and choose which files to download, and you could even go a step further and add a new source provider to e.g. Lidarr that would handle these torrent files and pick out the music you want.
Result?
- no need to transcode to MP3 (not sure why you’d want to do that anyway when OPUS files can be played by practically any modern device)
- no need to manually do any namings
- no need to manually get metadata
- no need to get 300TB storage
Hell if you really wanted to, you could even vibe code a solution that includes a torrent client, these music torrents, and a web interface + API that provides all the necessary info for existing clients to be essentially used as a quasi Spotify alternative, only downloading music you actually listen to.
How much of that music is AI generated slob?
A lot of it probably.
They have a breakdown of the data on their blog. If you scroll down to album releases by date, you can see a very sharp uptick in releases, with around ~2 million albums in 2019 to ~11 million albums in 2024.
They even make a comment on it likely being inflated by AI:
If we group albums by release year, we see that more and more new music is added to Spotify, a lot of it likely automatically generated: […] The amount of procedurally and AI generated content makes it hard to find what is actually valuable.
You should watch this video:
The dark side of Spotify from Slightly Sociable.
It’s about short AI music created for phone farms to steal royalties away from real artists. It’s a whole business model and Spotify encourages this malicious practice as all those phones use premium to earn money faster, and 33% of that money goes to Spotify. Plus they do other illegal stuff like promote music from stake holder companies over other music.
Thanks for sharing the vid; that was insanely fascinating, even if a bit depressing.
What’s even more depressing is that there isn’t a proper alternative. Many music streaming services have their own flaws. A friend of mine recommended Deezer, as it has really high quality streams but that one is owned by a Russian oligarch.
Artists are paid the most with Apple music but Apple is a shit company as well. Streaming is all fucked, same with movies / shows.
If you want to support the artists, buy their music on Bandcamp. Musicians are having it hard, they need our support. They deserve our money. It’s the pirate code: pirate from the mega corps and billionaires, support the little guys.
