Backing up Spotify(annas-archive.li) |
Backing up Spotify(annas-archive.li) |
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.
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.
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.
Distributing these huge torrents is the perfect way to avoid any real damage to artists while being invaluable to preservation of culture.
Anyone using DRM/paracopyright to "make their ends meet" deserves what they get. This is de facto theft from the public domain.
> /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*.
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?
what would your ISP do?
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)
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.
Jokes aside, I always thought the best way to deal with piracy was to understand or convince the demand not to do it over dealing with the supply.
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.
Now imagine a dedicated music client that will download and stream (and share, because we are polite) only the needed files :)
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.
Is there any way to search this spotify database without downloading the currently available metadata torrent?
Releasing indie music, like really low-level indie music, for free in the name of "preservation" is so misguided.
Don't do this. You will only end up hurting the artists who rely on paid downloads.
There is a ton of good bands with under 10k or even 1k monthly listeners.
Relying on an external hosted service would never cross my mind, and surely wouldn’t be something I go to on a daily basis.
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
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.
Yeah, the original quality is either a 320kbps OGG or lossless. Not 160.
While this is _a_ backup, it's a pretty lossy one.
A distributed ripping project to do that would be a fine thing.
Until we have reasonable copyright terms, Pirate On !
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.
So much interesting but undiscovered music is out there!
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.
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.
> do people get high and just start shoveling psy-trance tracks out or something?
Like with most art-forms, it's basically impossible to properly appreciate the art-form without having any context.
On Spotify, Blue Öyster Cult are listed as: ['album rock', 'classic rock', 'glam metal', 'hard rock', 'progressive rock', 'rock'] In the archive, they are just coming up as ['classic rock', 'hard rock']
Grimes: ['art pop', 'canadian electropop', 'grave wave', 'indietronica', 'metropopolis', 'neo-synthpop'] In the archive: ['art pop']
Taylor Swift: ['pop'] In the archive... nothing.
Are you people actually that childish that you don't understand the concept of taste, and that everyones' is different? People who have like different music than you aren't stupid. Electronic musicians aren't bad musicians.
You know that nice feeling you get when you listen to music from your preferred composer/artist/genre? Other people feel exactly the same, but with different kinds of music. Some people even love the thing that you hate! wow! Who knew? Except for anybody above the age of 5.
TLDR; just because you dont like Indian food, doesn't make Indian food bad. It's the same for music or other things that are dependent on taste.
In fact, I have a fairly sizeable collection of trance music on my NAS, mainly more mainstream stuff, but some is psytrance.
It's unreasonable to assume psytrance would organically occupy such a large portion of top Spotify songs.
TLDR; just because I think large number of Spotify psytrance songs are AI generated, doesn't mean I hate psytrance. Only childish people would think that.
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?
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'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'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't been a change in Spotify in last 7 years or so that wasn't negative.
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.
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.
Magnet link found here: https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify
Are magnet links allowed on HN?
If I were to do it today, I could get so much farther with hyperscaler products and this dataset.
Anecdotally, I know a few vocalists that sound great in these keys and use them as a starting point
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?
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.
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".
I'm a music archivist & preservationist, I've archived and found several formerly lost or on the verge of becoming lost albums, EPs, and Singles, and I've been wondering if the backup of Spotify so far, even with the available info, contain any taken down, region limited, or no longer available songs?
any response is appreciated!
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
I bet you can whip up a super simple script with an LLM to do this!
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.
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.)
In spotify_clean_track_files.sqlite3:
SELECT count(*), sum(filesize_bytes) FROM track_files;
255966403|15970064861274
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.
https://open.spotify.com/album/07IyzOA9jJWPZcLDysQwpo?si=KZO...
This is not an issue in my view. I like the fact that I can download 100 MiB ultra-high resolution TIFF files of scans of photographs from the original negative from the Library of Congress and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC files of captures of 78 RPM records from the Internet Archive. In addition to maintaining completeness and quality of information, one of the main goals of preservation is to guard against further degradation and information loss. You should try to preserve the highest quality copies available (because they contain more information) and re-encoding (deliberate degradation) should only be used to create convenient access copies.
Inferior copies, in addition to being less informative, have the potential to misinform. Only the archivist will enjoy space savings. All the readers who might consult your library in the infinite future will bear the cost.
> ...(e.g. lossless FLAC). This inflates the file size...
This is entirely the wrong view. The file size of a raw capture compressed to FLAC should be thought of as the “true” or “correct” size. It is roughly the most efficient (balancing various trade-offs) representation of sampled audio data that we can presently achieve. In preservation we seek to preserve the item or signal itself and not simply what we might perceive thereof. This human-centric perception view is just wrong. There is data in film photographs which cannot be perceived visually yet can be of interest to researchers and be revealed with digital image analysis tools.
As an example of how much information celluloid can contain see: https://vimeo.com/89784677 (context: he is comparing a Blu-ray and a scan of a 35mm print)
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.
This is literally all you need to back up Spotify.
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...).
Error HTTP 451 - Unavailable For Legal Reasons
So you can recreate the playlists on another Spotify account or another music service.
This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen through.
So you can really fall through the rabbit hole.
[1] He Talked A Big Game, Played A Small Tune by Dumpster Grooves. A better song than most human slop that sells stadiums. https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=mPBgJ_qO2AF80FGP
There's also obvious care and human creation there as well.
They have several "artists". Bertha Mae Lightning gets the better lyrics and artangements. Virgil Dillard gets simpler tunes and the occasional weird grammar/lyrics. And so on.
I even saved that radio as a playlist to show people: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/072Wp3cFsziKBQlnglF5XM?si=... It has both obvious AI ("artist" by the name of promptgenix) and not-so-obvious (Enlly Blue, Dumpster Grooves).
The weird/sad/funny/ironic part? Many of those songs are still better than whatever Taylor Swift and a lot of other artists produce.
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
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?
I can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.
It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...
Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10/month subscription?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker?
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.
Do they have DRM at all? Youtube and Pandora don't.
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.
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.
Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?
Curious why not? Assuming you only used the metadata. I think they would be considered raw facts and not copyrightable.
For them, 300TB is just cheap
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.
I didn't know German providers do this.
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.
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 "I hate spotify as a company but..."
(disclaimer: this text is NOT LLM generated, I wrote myself a summary of the summary. here's the Claude thread should anyone care https://claude.ai/share/cfc4ca63-2b9e-47ac-a360-202025d1a134)
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?
> 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!
Sure, you can also use Tor. The people engaged in copyright-related illegality generally don't.
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
Sure, there is AI stuff but also not.
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.
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
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.--------------
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.
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.
But MB is one of the best resources out there - precisely because of what you said - so I'm not complaining too much :)
Even perceived involvement in music piracy puts a much bigger target on their back from far more aggressive actors (RIAA, major labels)
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)
> 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.
So you might see a lot of anchoring just like YouTube videos kept stretching to almost exactly ten minutes?
"Their buisness model is based on copyright infringement"
Well, where to complain that Anna's Archive ain't a buisness?
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.
I would guess that combining these sources, along with info from MusicBrainz, would help quite a bit? Still, I'm rather surprised Spotify doesn't provide more information about artists.
As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'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'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't move!
(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)
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.)
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 "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.
This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It'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's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.
This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.
So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.
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.
- 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.
Alternative: https://archive.ph/2025.12.21-050644/https://annas-archive.l...
This is also how, for example, RT is blocked in Germany.
alextud popcorntime
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?
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
It has 0 censorship - regarding pirated content at least.
I wonder if GitHub flags it to not be indexed or something.
https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/sp...
If AA goes down, it's not the end of it all, a new one comes back up and the seeders are still there.
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.
> 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.
Are you sure? I don't think they are, from what I've seen
https://www.scribd.com/document/56651812/kreitz-spotify-kth1...
KTH link is better than scribd for downloading. though academic links are sometimes prone to link rot.
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.
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.
- searchable website
- incredible well thought out postgres database that differentiates, for example, a recording from a release (and much, much more)
- ability to replicate changes to said database hourly to your own environment
- workable system for schema updates
- cover art archive
- refined interface for submitting/moderating listings
- etc.
How is that a problem?
for each track in collection do extract_fingerprintBought a spotify card with cash, email was registered on public wifi.
Who cares? :-)
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.
But yes, it is inconvenient and slow.
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.
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.
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)
Some local radio DJs frequently play songs I enjoy that have under 1K plays on youtube. No algo or platform is surfacing those. Local radio gets me both local and international music. A friend of mine prefers critically acclaimed stuff, so he streams radio shows from NTS and the like.
I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.
Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.
So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.
Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.
(And I say this as a music enthusiast myself)
i completely understand the archive's decision on applying their own compression.
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.
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.
Will be interesting to see what's there and not once the actual music torrents come up, should make it easier to search.
I hope readers will feel our frustration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
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.
It's not voluntary anymore, it's required.
this is not a requirement, they're just asking. The BNetzA just wants to not deal with it apparently.
See also the recent CCC talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...
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.
Until they decide to silence the artist you want to listen to because emperor god trump decides to unperson them.
Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
>I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience
Spotify isn't "convenient" if you want to control and understand the media and software in your life. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/spotify
Thankfully Spotify isn't primarily a U.S company.
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.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-...
I certainly wouldn't attempt
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
people defend convenience way too much. spotify isn't good for us and spotify-like-streaming is destroying the music industry.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g (same thing, but on an official channel instead)
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.
I want this torrent though. It would be fun to stand up a NAS for this.
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.
Is it because this time it's going to a European company?
More than two things can be utterly disgusting at the very same time!
I'm not american and I'm not interested in your ideas about who to kill.
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.
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.
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.
That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
\s
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.
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?
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.
(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.
No, you literally can't.
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.
Premium gets 320kbit/s (or lossless)
so either they found a way around that lock, but not the quality lock, or they just decided 160k is good enough (it generally is), and decided to stick with that for filesize & bandwidth savings
So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.
It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0.
And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
was it the accent?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
[0]: https://simkl.com/5743957/list/59981/cancelled-tv-shows-netf...
That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.
How much media that the average person choses to consume is this 'free use' media? How much is media that artists chose to make money from?
By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.
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.
No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?
That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
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.)
My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.
If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.
But I was referring specifically to all third-party reverse-engineered Spotify players requiring premium accounts to function at all.
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.
IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.
Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.
The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.
Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.
They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.
And that's before we ask the question of how to identify AI-generated music (no one asks that question, but everyone wants it removed).
(It is plausible they added some new DRM but it's not going to be anything too crazy)
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.
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.
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.
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.
You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
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.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money. But I have a right to expect that e.g. code I develop in my toolkit will remain my own to provide me an income.
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?
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.
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.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
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?
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.
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.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.
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).
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.
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.
Maybe not the best comparison to anything. Swift is known for being an even better busiensswoman than artist and obsessed with having control.
She screwed her record company for profits, not the other way around. Not many people have done that. She's likely making money on both ends of the stick.
"$2 or more per thousand streams, split across rightsholders" seems like an accurate estimate.
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.
Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.
My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)
Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
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.
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.
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.
Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
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.
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.
Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.
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.
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.