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.
To be fair, the 10k is just a sample. The true amount is 86 million, about a quarter of all Spotify songs.
Also it sounds like they had difficulty scraping some of the less popular songs and got them from somewhere else.