There&#x27;s some irony here considering Spotify used pirated mp3s at the start of their operations, I suppose.

Some people&#x27;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.

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...).

lol is this comedy? Cuz it&#x27;s absolutely hilarious opposite humor.

You&#x27;re talking about Spotify, right? Famously started by ad execs pirating music and then selling it.

It&#x27;s not. It&#x27;s awful people justifying awful behaviour. And it&#x27;s why we can&#x27;t have nice things. There are always assholes ready to exploit others.

they do concern themselves with it, but in a &quot;calling it out for being shit&quot; kind of way.

Not legal. This group does not concern themselves with copyright law.

Adherence to the legal framework is a function of your risk appetite.

Very, if we delete copyright like we&#x27;re supposed to.

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?

How legal is this with regards to copyright laws?

What do you think about the recent SAM audio model by meta?
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.meta.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;sam-audio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.meta.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;sam-audio&#x2F;</a>

Wow. Anna is a godsend. Hopefully now we get some really good open source music models

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 &#x2F; torrent warning emails from Comcast itself. &quot;We know you torrented The.Pokemon.Movie.2001.h264.mkv, you better stop that!&quot;A full year of these emails and nothing more than that ever happened.(if you&#x27;re wondering how I hit 8000 torrents, the answer is individual album torrents)

&gt; and a way to download that without my ISP doing something about it.what would your ISP do?

Wow. Now I just need some hard drives and a way to download that without my ISP doing something about it. That&#x27;s amazing.

Probably not, those tools don&#x27;t actually download Spotify tracks at source quality.

they&#x27;re probably just using something like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nor-dee&#x2F;spotizerr-spotify" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nor-dee&#x2F;spotizerr-spotify</a>

It&#x27;s hard to imagine anything but physical egress for that kind of volume.

I would guess this can be hidden under normal music streaming activity? But one would need lots of proxies!

Rent a dedicated server, setup mullvad wireguard on it or whatever. Download stuff to said server using wireguard.Sure, you can also use Tor. The people engaged in copyright-related illegality generally don&#x27;t.

I mean 300TB is nothing for a streaming service, like it woudn&#x27;t even show on a dashboard. They probably did that over weeks which is invisible.

Perhaps they leased a botnet. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;10&#x2F;aisuru-botnet-shifts-from-ddos-to-residential-proxies&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;10&#x2F;aisuru-botnet-shifts-fro...</a>

How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.

Where the magic actually happens: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;librespot-org&#x2F;librespot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;librespot-org&#x2F;librespot</a>

It is not hard. But please don&#x27;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:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;raphson&#x2F;music-server&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;main&#x2F;spotify-sync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;raphson&#x2F;music-server&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;main&#x2F;sp...</a>

&quot;at scale&quot; 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?

Incredible.&gt; 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!

Yes, blocked. This is what I see in germany without a VPN<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notice.cuii.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notice.cuii.info&#x2F;</a>&quot;Their buisness model is based on copyright infringement&quot;Well, where to complain that Anna&#x27;s Archive ain&#x27;t a buisness?

Probably not down, but blocked by your ISP. Try a VPN. Same thing happens here.

Site is down for me. Archive link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;jf3HW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;jf3HW</a>

&gt; 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.

&gt; 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 &quot;enterprise-level&quot; access to their complete archives in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. AI may not be their original&#x2F;primary motivation but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing.

&gt; 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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;11&#x2F;is-your-android-tv-streaming-box-part-of-a-botnet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;11&#x2F;is-your-android-tv-strea...</a>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!

They’re doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for AI companies.

&gt; 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&#x27;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.

Spotify is $12&#x2F;month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.To get access to &quot;all&quot; TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy&#x2F;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&#x2F;Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.

&gt; The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It&#x27;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&#x27;s not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt; There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movieBefore we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.

&gt; They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.So it&#x27;s just yet another instance of enormous luck &#x2F; 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&#x27;s not forget that Anna&#x27;s Archive is also the host to the world&#x27;s largest pirate library of books and articles.

&gt; The thing is, this doesn&#x27;t even seem particularly useful for average consumers&#x2F;listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000&#x27;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.&gt; Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers&#x2F;companies who wanted this stuff.The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.

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.

&gt;&gt; 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&#x27;t really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained&#x2F;tested on...?Didn&#x27;t Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They&#x27;re too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.

Especially since they scraped Spotify&#x27;s popularity rating as well

Self-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don&#x27;t give a damn is telling.Spotify&#x27;s own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. &quot;Valence&quot;, &quot;Energy&quot;, &quot;Danceability&quot;, 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&#x27;t nicely linearly separable.

The metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably

I would expect more data to make ai music generation better

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&#x27;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&#x27;s probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...

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).

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.

It&#x27;s called playplay. It&#x27;s used for protecting their new lossless files. But the first rule of playplay is you can&#x27;t talk about playplay. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;spotify-dismantles-spotifydl-track-download-extension-via-dmca-notice-250429&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;spotify-dismantles-spotifydl-track-...</a>

&gt; 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&#x27;t.

&gt;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.

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.

Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.

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&#x27;t that big of a deal. Music piracy isn&#x27;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 &quot;this is theft&quot; which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it&#x27;s just a weird gaslighting. there&#x27;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&#x27;re doing the same thing :) It&#x27;s a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.

Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?

I just started DJing and something I quickly noticed is how garbage Spotify&#x27;s music sounds compared to FLACs I&#x27;ve purchased. The max bitrate is very low.

This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.

&gt; this doesn&#x27;t even seem particularly useful for average consumers&#x2F;listenersI can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.

Netflix didn&#x27;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.

There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of popular movies on their streaming service.

&gt;The thing is, this doesn&#x27;t even seem particularly useful for average consumerit&#x27;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

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&#x27;t have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.

Spotify doesn&#x27;t take care of artists, if you knew any artists you&#x27;d understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.

What, precisely, is the point you’re trying to make here?

How does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There&#x27;s virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.

updated - thank you commenters for making it clear that my sentiment was not clear

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 &#x2F; regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.

&gt; Slow, but effective.I wouldn&#x27;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.

They&#x27;d probably do a shit job of capturing it?

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&#x27;t matter, but then you would be limited to only ripping 24 hours of audio per day...

&gt;I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.What&#x27;s stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker?Slow, but effective.

Id be stunned if we didn&#x27;t find out Anna&#x27;s Archive is a front for a handful of shadier VCs who are into AI. Even if AA themselves don&#x27;t know it and just take the cash.

&gt; Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000&#x27;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?

&gt; The thing is, this doesn&#x27;t even seem particularly useful for average consumers&#x2F;listenersYeah. 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&#x27;s music just doesn&#x27;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.)

Just cite facebook getting busted training its AI on torrents proven to contain unlicensed material lol

They already have this data. See jukebox from OpenAI, released before chatgpt.

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

Because the laws are there to protect people with money from people who don&#x27;t have money.

Flippant response: If it&#x27;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 &#x2F; stolen copyrighted material in investigative journalism.

&gt; The thing is, this doesn&#x27;t even seem particularly useful for average consumers&#x2F;listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000&#x27;s of tracks each sounds horrible.Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?

This, indeed, has mostly implications for ML, training, etc. As otherwise the whole catalog is available to partners, but costs a lot. So Anna did indeed liberate the content, but I&#x27;m definitely not switching off my Spotify subscription, even though, in my personal taste, neither quality, nor UI does match Apple Music. It is still useful to have s.o. serve the content for you.

I believe that we need to distinguish between convenience and preservation here. It is indeed convenient for consumers to use Spotify now whilst it exists and operates the way it does. They could go under, they could change their business model, they could decide to purge everything that is not easily justifiable commercially.As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.

A little off topic, but I remain naively hopeful that the horror you describe will keep Spotify from going down the same road Netflix did once content owners decided to get into the streaming business themselves, so that streaming a movie today requires you to &quot;change the channel&quot; to whichever service offers that movie.Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10&#x2F;month subscription?

&gt;The only thing is, you can&#x27;t really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained&#x2F;tested on...?Curious why not? Assuming you only used the metadata. I think they would be considered raw facts and not copyrightable.

This makes me think that after the crack, they probably had to come up with a formula that can statistically calculate how fast they should download spotify songs without letting Spotify realizing that they&#x27;re scraping the company data and block the access. Remind me of Alan Turing formula after cracking the Enigma

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&#x27;t even seem particularly useful for average consumers&#x2F;listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000&#x27;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&#x27;t really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained&#x2F;tested on...?Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers&#x2F;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?

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.

I wonder how deep the hole they&#x27;re gonna put whoever runs this site into is gonna be?

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.

Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.

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).

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&#x27;t bother with streaming, really.(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don&#x27;t like being dependent on the Internet and a renter&#x27;s whims for something as essential as music, I guess)

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.

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.

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!

&gt; There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn&#x27;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&#x27;re done.Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don&#x27;t like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you&#x27;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.

&gt; I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on thereSo 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&#x27;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&#x2F;scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.

What.cd were extreme sticklers for quality! When you applied to get in, they did a live interview on IRC to test your knowledge of ripping, transcoding, and different kinds of compression, how torrents and private trackers work, and their code of conduct. I remember studying for it. They also had ways to make sure you weren&#x27;t cheating like checking your screen, as well as very aggressive automated checks for VPNs and blocklisted IPs to prevent ban evasion and multiple accounts.They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you&#x27;re lucky it&#x27;s just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I&#x27;m still looking for to this day after it shut down.Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn&#x27;t really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn&#x27;t move!

I think what earned what.cd that title wasn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I&#x27;ve seen live and own records and merchandise of.

I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk

&gt;We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymoreThey&#x27;re still kind of around, but yeah, everything is very much on it&#x27;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 &quot;offline&quot; 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&#x27;t that hard and really hasn&#x27;t changed much. People just don&#x27;t want to spend any time or effort doing it. Music stores still exist, they&#x27;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&#x27;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.)

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

Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.

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.

Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.

anna&#x27;s rip has ~86m tracks, not ~186. ~186m is metadata, specifically ISRCs.

It&#x27;s 160kbit&#x2F;s for popularity&gt;0 and 75kbit&#x2F;s for popularity=0. I&#x27;m surprised Anna&#x27;s Archive went for this given that these are not archival quality bitrates. It appears they did this because they found a way, rather than seeking to create a library of music.

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:&gt; The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit&#x2F;s.meanwhile the tracker had 16&#x2F;24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track&#x27;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.

Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories! OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical community

&gt; What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it&#x27;s depth.It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.And it also had all the &quot;weird&quot;&#x2F;non-standard things you don&#x27;t find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.This Anna&#x27;s release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It&#x27;s almost the exact opposite:- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it&#x27;s not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there&#x27;s no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.

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&#x27;s depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna&#x27;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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;What.CD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;What.CD</a>

This already exists and is interesting to play around with - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ASLP-lab&#x2F;DiffRhythm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ASLP-lab&#x2F;DiffRhythm</a>

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.

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&#x27;t reproduce it. This effect exists though I&#x27;m not sure if it is the cause of the pattern here.

Electronic dance music is the biggest genre in the data. So then easy to play shouldn&#x27;t matter. It&#x27;s still an interesting question. I think playing Db is pretty nice on the piano even if it&#x27;s not the easiest.

C# I don’t believe was&#x2F;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&#x2F;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.

&gt; 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 (&quot;C#m&quot;), it&#x27;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?

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&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;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

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)

For electronic music, it&#x27;s around the lowest bass root note that most systems can play well without a subwoofer. C pretty much requires a sub and things rarely go lower than that.

Can someone explain why C#&#x2F;Db (major&#x2F;minor) is the third most popular key? Very unexpected for me, since its relatively more difficult to play.

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.

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.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ludvig_Strigeus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ludvig_Strigeus</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.csc.kth.se&#x2F;~gkreitz&#x2F;spotify&#x2F;kreitz-spotify_kth11.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.csc.kth.se&#x2F;~gkreitz&#x2F;spotify&#x2F;kreitz-spotify_kth11...</a>KTH link is better than scribd for downloading. though academic links are sometimes prone to link rot.

spotify used to do just that (stream p2p) until 2014 or so<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scribd.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;56651812&#x2F;kreitz-spotify-kth11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scribd.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;56651812&#x2F;kreitz-spotify-kth1...</a>

for me its the arms trade.Daniel Ek pours spotify wealth into next gen miltech.sometimes I worry that I don&#x27;t know what music means to other people but I am certain that to me it is antithetical to war culture.

I&#x27;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.

I&#x27;d rather download music and buy LP&#x27;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&#x27;s, I don&#x27;t understand why they don&#x27;t let people purchase their stuff? Like maybe it&#x27;s for the &quot;limited feeling&quot;, but that just feels dumb as fuck.

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.

Not that we should, but it&#x27;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.

I wonder how definitive their collection is and how much ripping Google Music&#x2F;YouTube would improve on this.A distributed ripping project to do that would be a fine thing.

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)

Is the music torrent not up yet? Only see the metadata one here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annas-archive.li&#x2F;torrents&#x2F;spotify" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annas-archive.li&#x2F;torrents&#x2F;spotify</a>

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.

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.

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.

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.

Really? How about asking google to &quot;play bloomberg news on spotify&quot; next time. Then see if you can remove the resulting chaos from your history so it won&#x27;t start feeding you slop.

Since relatively recently I&#x27;m getting AI music in my automatic radio. They look&#x2F;sound like soulless facsimiles of the real thing.

I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I&#x27;m still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it&#x27;s specific to genres, but I haven&#x27;t encountered any generated junk tracks.

I think perhaps the assumption of the OP (I know mine was in the early days) was that &quot;discovery&quot; on Spotify would involve human tastemakers and some kind of dynamic aggregation of peer tastes that could lead to organic discovery of new music, no matter how niche or obscure.As opposed to what it has now devolved into: the most basic of similarity matching always showing you the same few hundred songs, combined with increasingly numerous paid placements.

Why 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.

When they launched Discover Weekly thing, I used to add at least 1 track from it to my library - it was insanely good. Now it&#x27;s all junk - not even close to what I listen to.They also removed a lot of discovery features - Playlist Radio - for example. And they still do have some version of it on the backend, but you have to go through some weird mechanisms to trigger it - like play the last song in playlist, wait till it ends (or rewind) and you get the playlist radio. But it&#x27;s also a crippled version of it - prefers playing the exact same popular songs for some reason.Then they released this DJ thing, which is laughably bad. No Spotify, I don&#x27;t want someone talking to me with useless information in between songs. Who though that was a good idea? Who actually uses that?There hasn&#x27;t been a change in Spotify in last 7 years or so that wasn&#x27;t negative.

Unrelated, but I just can&#x27;t stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

Yes but very hard to scrape in bulk from user accounts

Wasn&#x27;t all data available to users though?

I mean... not really? Not much music is Spotify exclusive (at least from the  99.6% of what people listen to mentioned in the article), and from friends in the industry I can guarantee you all major content platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a large chunk of YouTube) have already been completely copied without a business agreement with the rightsholders by AI startups and big-name players.

Who cares now, it&#x27;s already downloaded and ready to be torrented... God is good

Holy crap. This is going to trigger a five-alarm fire at Spotify Engineering. This has got to be among the largest proprietary datasets ever unintentionally publicized by a company.

I 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&#x27;t care how you frame it.Making media effectively lost is not much different in my mind. Is it available if it&#x27;s sitting on a tape in an iron mountain bunker that no one will ever look at again?

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 :)

You can download torrents selectively. I think if they adopted that cautious attitude they wouldn&#x27;t exist in the first place

Oh, I was somehow under impression that libgen is no more. Glad to see it&#x27;s not. I guess it was just a different domain.

Anna&#x27;s archive mirrors z-lib and libgen, so those are the main alternatives. But it&#x27;s unlikely anna&#x27;s archive would go down so easily, they take a lot of precautions.

think popcorn time for mp3s&#x2F;flac instead of mp4.a client can selectively list and then stream individual files from a huge torrent. if you&#x27;ve ever watched illegal movies&#x2F;shows on those random domain websites, you&#x27;re likely streaming it from a torrent on the backend somewhere.it wouldn&#x27;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 &quot;quasi-self-hosted jellyfin&quot;. Where a person host a thin client on a machine that then fetches the data from the torrent, then allows the user to &quot;select&quot; their library. A user can just select &quot;Top hits from the 80s&quot; and it&#x27;ll grab those files from the torrent, then stream or back them up.I don&#x27;t really see why it wouldn&#x27;t, from an end user perspective, be any different than a self hosted jellyfin or plexamp.

I have a Supermicro 24 bay 2U in my house with an array around half that size in it.  It’s not prohibitive.

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.

The cost of rest of the hardware, running it constantly, and &#x27;admin&#x27; overheads aren&#x27;t to be scoffed at to be fair.

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&#x27;s not crazy at all to snag a server with enough bays to house all those.

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 &quot;good for you&quot;, because I don&#x27;t actually think it is good for Anna&#x27;s Archive. I wouldn&#x27;t touch that thing, if I was them. Do we even have any solid alternatives for books, if Anna&#x27;s Archive gets shot down, by the way? Don&#x27;t recommend Amazon, please.

I really don&#x27;t understand how focusing on source quality files is supposed to be a &quot;major issue&quot; with the music preservation community. It&#x27;s bizarre for them to talk about these being barriers for creating a &quot;full archive of all music that humanity has ever produced&quot; have and their answer be scraping Spotify to end up with a music library comprised of many AI and bulk produced songs at 75&#x2F;160kbps.

great.  Spotify just removes things all the time (things I actively listen to and work on for my jazz practices, one day just go &quot;poof&quot; because they didn&#x27;t want to pay the record company anymore), and they are not as a company deserving of the role of &quot;keeper of all the world&#x27;s music&quot;.  They don&#x27;t give a shit and they&#x27;d vastly prefer we all listen to their AI generated royalty free crap and Joe Rogan.

It seems to be that the metadata doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t support downloading lyrics for a given ISRC.

Is there a way to see the shape of the metadata?

New multimodal training set just dropped.

Not that using the Spotify API directly is all that hard but the spotipy library makes
it even easier.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.spotify.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;web-api&#x2F;reference&#x2F;get-a-list-of-current-users-playlists" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.spotify.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;web-api&#x2F;referenc...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.spotify.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;web-api&#x2F;reference&#x2F;get-playlist#:~:text=The%20tracks%20of%20the%20playlist." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.spotify.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;web-api&#x2F;referenc...</a>I bet you can whip up a super simple script with an LLM to do this!

This works nicely: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;spotDL&#x2F;spotify-downloader" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;spotDL&#x2F;spotify-downloader</a>

I worry about potential bans from scraping files through this sort of thing.

You can also do this with your human brain, which doesn&#x27;t require 1 MWh or a thousand gallons of water to write a script to pipe API results to jq.

This is where ChatGPT shines. Just ask it to write you a script, it&#x27;ll give you all the instructions.I&#x27;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.)

There are a few tools that can export your spotify playlists into folders of audio files. That&#x27;s what I used a few years ago for my initial spotify -&gt; navidrome migration.But they&#x27;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&#x27;ve had some issues with metadata. I&#x27;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&#x27;m assuming that new playlist export tools will soon show up, and they&#x27;ll use these new torrents as source instead of youtube. They&#x27;ll be a lot more reliable. I&#x27;d wait for that to happen. In fact I may end up re-exporting my old spotify playlist.

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.

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.

Thanks for linking that page, interesting rabbit hole that I hadn&#x27;t heard about until today…

Amazing! I wonder if the Every Noise At Once[1] site could be updated with the metadata from this?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everynoise.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everynoise.com&#x2F;</a>

Oh this is going to go over real well in Nashville, TN.

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.

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&#x27;s no possibility for me to find out what was there).That&#x27;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

This is one of the greatest news I&#x27;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!

I am not enthused by this news. Let us entertain the possibility that similar institutions will eschew this catalog.

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.

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&#x2F;8&#x2F;9.&gt; They are based in russia.“Russian authorities have without any notice suspended Russia&#x27;s most popular file-sharing website torrents.ru for the alleged violation of copyright laws.” (2010) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.petosevic.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;news&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;000350" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.petosevic.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;news&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;000350</a>“In 2016, for example, the Moscow City Court (Mosgorsud) granted more than 700 requests to protect intellectual property.” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.group-ib.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;torrents&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.group-ib.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;torrents&#x2F;</a>“The ISPs in Russia are required to block subscriber access to thepiratebay.se and thepiratebay.mn following the complaint of […]” (2015) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maverickeye.de&#x2F;russia-has-ordered-local-isps-to-block-the-pirate-bay&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maverickeye.de&#x2F;russia-has-ordered-local-isps-to-...</a>“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” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inverse.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;9619-russia-will-crack-down-on-the-15-most-popular-torrent-websites" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inverse.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;9619-russia-will-crack-down-...</a>etcThere 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.

&gt; They are based in russia.Are you sure? I don&#x27;t think they are, from what I&#x27;ve seen

&quot;and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns&#x2F;prosecution&quot;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.

A lot of the ebook data has very few seeders, and it very much looks like they may all be AA. I assume it is a handful of people who this all relies on. I doubt there are many complete mirrors, if any. And even if there are, who of those are not only willing to seed but also run and redo all of the necessary infrastructure when shit hits the fan. As far as I can see, there is currently only one place left to actually contribute and upload material. The torrent music scene is a number of multitudes larger than that.

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&#x27;s not the end of it all, a new one comes back up and the seeders are still there.

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&#x2F;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.

I hope they get the new lossless versions

&gt; I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?Don&#x27;t talk to people like here, please. It&#x27;s passive aggressive and unproductive. GP&#x27;s comment was fine, if not a bit impassioned, regardless if you agree with it.

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&#x27;t you continue to enjoy those benefits?Many people think &#x27;real&#x27; music has electric guitars. I think they&#x27;re wrong, but why argue with them? I think it&#x27;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.

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.

that is only 199gb, the real one is 300TB

199GB, only metadata released for now.Magnet link found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annas-archive.li&#x2F;torrents&#x2F;spotify" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annas-archive.li&#x2F;torrents&#x2F;spotify</a>Are magnet links allowed on HN?

For some reason, the link does not work for me (spain). Works perfect at the same time in tor browser.

You know, I had the (at time of writing) 600 something comments ran through Opus 4.5 and do a summary of the sentiments. It could&#x27;t find a single comment that genuinely defends Spotify or expresses sympathy for the company.HN crowd is, of course, biased in the technocratic sense, but you see - everyone seems to actually rejoice the move.The closest to remorse is `linhns` and `locusofself` expressing concern about artists getting hurt (not Spotify itself), but locusofself prefaces with &quot;I hate spotify as a company but...&quot;(disclaimer: this text is NOT LLM generated, I wrote myself a summary of the summary. here&#x27;s the Claude thread should anyone care <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;claude.ai&#x2F;share&#x2F;cfc4ca63-2b9e-47ac-a360-202025d1a134" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;claude.ai&#x2F;share&#x2F;cfc4ca63-2b9e-47ac-a360-202025d1a134</a>)

Are those 404 links available on web.archive.org?

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&#x27;s worth questioning the value of preserving -everything-, but it seems like if we can, we should.

Backing up Spotify