This is insane.
I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. Or if the major record labels already license their entire catalogs for training purposes cheaply enough, so this really is just solely intended as a preservation effort?
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
> Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff.
The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
> 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.
You go where the money is. Infra isn’t free. Churches pass the plate every Sunday. Perhaps one day we’ll exist in a more optimal socioeconomic system; until then, you do what you have to do to accomplish your goals (in this context, archivists and digital preservation).
> Infra isn’t free.
There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
You have been able to buy DRM free digital music from all of the record labels since 2009 from Apple and other stores.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?
There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.
Quboz, bandcamp, etc.
Bandcamp is still my go to for owning music. Nice platform, just works.
I still buy DRM free music from Amazon.
Piracy went down quite a bit since that is possible.
You've been able to buy DRM free digital music since the 1980s.
Technically not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
I think OP was referring to CDs, which AFAIK don't have DRM.
My link is to the CD DRM!
This is rather misleading. Standard CDs as sold had (and have) no DRM.
The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.
Unless the CD comes with a root kit that interferes with that copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
> DRM free digital music from all of the record labels
Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?
Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.
https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/
While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format
ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011. https://macosforge.github.io/alac/
Wow. How did I miss that!!!
The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.
A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.
Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?
I don’t know about Mountain Fever, but for anything I haven’t been able to find on Bandcamp, I’ve been able to find on Qobuz.
they made cd singles and single song purchases long before streaming
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
There are several labs and researchers with ideas on how to do this and published books on the subject (https://www.sharing-thebook.com/).
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
This would work on niche segments and not for the masses. Look up YouTube subscribers to Pateon ratio.
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.
If we're purely talking about music then almost everything is on YouTube, which has a subscription cost of $0/mo.
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”
Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.
> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
The worldwide median internet download bandwidth is about 100 Mbps, which is far enough for HD or bluray video. The technical barrier can be as low as 'click to search, click to download' in some user-friendly BT clients. That being said, the price of these subscriptions is a problem that actually needs to be solved.
Anyone is free to release under free use in our current system. You already can live with the benefits of no IP law by just limiting yourself to those people that chose to to release this way.
It's not the bits that are copyrighted, it's the performance and the creative work.
Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
> 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.
„Shared delusion“ - just another term for „social contract“?
Sort of? The contract doesn't mention that "value" and "price" are just as often negatively correlated as positively so, though, and claims the opposite (always positive correlation), hence where the shared delusion comes in.
> Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born
This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.
Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
> 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.
Thanks for the tip.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
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.
Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
I agree completely. Parasites with money like to keep open the legal loopholes for their clever wheeze.
Data are basically free. Infra to store and transfer data is not.
Everyone is doing it, who Cates anymore. Genie's out of the bottle, we could've tried to solve this for decades and yet we didn't so now we reap what we sowed. Happens, move on.
Do you have evidence they are profiting? I'm genuinely curious how these kinds of archives sustain themselves.
I don’t think any of them are breaking even when you consider the maintenance costs, I just thought it was kind of funny considering the nature of the line of work they are in.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
They take donations.
Just to nitpick, that doesn't imply profit. They could be breaking even (and probably are working at a loss).
I admit the irony, but also funny reminder that Spotify started with a pirated catalogue back on the day.
You go where the money is.
That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
Or they know that those parties are going to hammer their servers no matter what so they will at least try and get some money out of it.
I think there is a big legal difference between helping preserve books and papers with little regard for copyrights, to then turn around and selling access to large companies.
That made me chuckle, Enterprise Level Access. I mean as ai company, that’s incredibly cheap and instead of torrenting something, why get it. That price is just a fraction of a engineers salary.
But then you have a money trail connecting the company unambiguously to copyright violations on a scale that is arguably larger than Napster.
I believe they're largely targeting foreign companies who don't care much about US copyright law.
I mean Facebook and Anthropic both torrented LibGen in its entirety.
Yeah,how devstating it would be for Anna's Archive to be found skirting copyright laws. Their reputation may never recover.
\s
He meant the AI companies
I mean, the same comment applies mutatis mutandis.
So either these folks, who are admittedly living targets of all the world's copyright lawyers, have means to receive tens of thousands of USD anonymously and stealthily,
or they are totally immune to deanon / getting tracked down,
or they are stupid enough to allow their greed to become their downfall,
or this legend about underground warriors of light fighting against evil copyrighters is utter bullshit.
> I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
Who cares, today is pretty easy to be part of a botnet. Having a slightly outdated lightbulb qualifies, so I'd not bother.
Having an IoT device with security vulnerabilities does not automatically make you vulnerable to botnets because it’s behind your router’s NAT under normal conditions.
Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices.
The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection
Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
Nope, many IoT devices open ports via UPnP. The biggest botnets are composed of (among other things) smart plugs, baby monitors, doorbells, IP cameras...
> 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.
I think the people seeding these are also ideologs and so would be interested in also supporting the obscure stuff, maybe more than the popular. There is no way any casual listeners would go to the quite substantial trouble of using these archives.
Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
It's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close.
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
Barely all. I have so many songs in my playlist that has randomly become unavailable. It's quite frustrating to be honest.
It's absolutely not all, I'm an extremely casual listener, not 'into' music or anything, and I have plenty in a playlist that have disappeared (mostly I don't even know what they are, it's just greyed out with no information) for whatever reason. And that's just the stuff that was there at some point that I liked.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Spotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
how are some tracks more profitable to spotify than others?
They were caught flooding their own playlists with specially for them produced Garbage Music for which they don't have to pay royalties
https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-...
> There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie
Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
> They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then.
Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain.
And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
They’re doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for AI companies.
[flagged]
They know about AI companies and don't mind AI companies, but they're not doing it because AI companies.
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.
What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work.
For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/
For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/
This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.
Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
I get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.
Under the current system people can release everything they want as free use.
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?
This doesn't do much for the argument that artists only do art for money. Everyone knows what happens to free use art, same as what happens to FOSS: corpos bundle it up and sell it back to people.
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.
> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
I challenge you to ask 10 creative people in your life if they would stop doing whatever it is they do if they had a billion dollars.
Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?
> Would they do what they do if they had zero 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.
Yes, as long as they have enough to survive, people generally have some free time. I know someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and they make music as a hobby. Obviously, if you have to work 16 hours a day to survive they wouldn't do it – or at least they wouldn't have the capacity to share it.
The desire to create something does not seem like an immutable characteristic.
"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
Flippant response: If it's ok for Meta for commercial use, why not for researchers for legitimate research work?
More serious response: research is explicitly included in fair use protections in US copyright law. News organizations regularly use leaked / stolen copyrighted material in investigative journalism.
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'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.
The metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably
Self-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don't give a damn is telling.
Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.
Especially since they scraped Spotify's popularity rating as well
I can't think of many situations where that would be particularly valuable, considering it favours recent plays and the cutoff date is already almost half a year old.
Helps train an algorithm to figure out which music is popular, as a training signal
If that's all the issues there are with the dataset, it is probably far and away the best dataset any researcher has ever used.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?
I am not, how did they solve that?
> this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners
I can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.
>The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumer
it's an archive to defend against Spotify going away. Remember when Netflix had everything, and then that eroded and now you can only rely on stuff that Netflix produced itself?
the average consumer will flock when Spotify ultimately enshitifies
Netflix didn't lose content by choice. Actual right holders decided to pull their content and create rival services.
Has nothing to do with perceived enshittification by Netflix (even though they have enshittification too).
Spotify is under the same threat: they have no content that they own. Everything is licensed.
Spotify is banking on AI music which is enough to tell you everything you need to know about the company, their C-suite and their opinion on music.
The bit in the blog post about the amount of music uploaded yearly to Spotify was shocking.
I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
> 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
> Spotify is banking on AI music
Are they?
Yes, they actively promote playlists with AI music to corner the "chill work" music without having to pay anything to musicians.
Ah yes. The reason is because all the money is in the chill music. And not in the fact that the most formulaic genres get flooded with easily generated music ("chill work" music especially doesn't even need sophisticated AI, a random number generator would work).
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).
But, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.
> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
I thought they started producing their own podcasts. Can't bring in much though.
260+ million songs they don't own vs a dozen or so podcasts
They also have fake artists they put on playlists :P
Yes, but it's still the required correction to your claim. I actually don't know how many podcasts are using their publishing platform. I imagine it's considerably more than a dozen.
They want to own something but it's always going to be a drop in the ocean. They have a small new music label thing called RADAR but I imagine the failure rate on that is very high. They need to buy a label if they want to meaningfully change this. Just like Amazon now owns MGM and Netflix maybe getting Warner Bros. Presumably they can't afford to do this, and I don't think that integration would work as well in the music industry.
There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of popular movies on their streaming service.
For their mail service they did
>I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
What's stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker?
Slow, but effective.
> 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.
Even if you plug the audio output into the input you would still be taking a quality loss by passing the audio through a DAC and then an ADC. Maybe if the quality of your hardware is good enough it wouldn't matter, but then you would be limited to only ripping 24 hours of audio per day...
They recently started offering lossless, could you get down to the equivalent of 320kbps?
I grew up on sites like Suprnova, and quickly found I could not discern the difference between 320 mp3s and lossless.
Even now, I only seem to notice if I use a very high end pair of headphones, and mostly with electronic music that has a lot of soft parts with sounds that are in the low or high end of the spectrum.
Bro. Who cares. Ive got bunch of songs like this. The loss makes it more nostalgic
Audio fingerprinting?
>Audio fingerprinting?
Bought a spotify card with cash, email was registered on public wifi.
Who cares? :-)
They'd probably do a shit job of capturing it?
> Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?
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
They already have this data. See jukebox from OpenAI, released before chatgpt.
I dunno if they publish like a 10 TB torrent of the most popular music I can see people making their own music services. A 10 TB hard disk is easily affordable, and that's about 3 million songs which is way more than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, even if you reduce that by 100x to account for taste.
It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...
I would expect more data to make ai music generation better
The problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators.
An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.
In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.
When they say "worse" they do mean the AI will get better which will be worse because they are ideologically opposed to AI.
I'm not ideologically opposed to AI. The problem will get worse because while the quality of the music will improve, it will still be bad and there will also be a lot more of it.
We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing.
If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.
This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.
Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.
I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.
Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.
No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".
The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.
After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for 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.
Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.
When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ".
Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.
Yes, when the entertainment industry came onboard they immediately made the service much worse. I reacted the same way you did.
IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.
Spotify pays 70% of revenue to rights holders.
Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?
That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like.
Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.
And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.
Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.
As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.
Content creation as a career is probably dead.
(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.
(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)
(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).
> Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not
No, you literally can't.
I just started DJing and something I quickly noticed is how garbage Spotify's music sounds compared to FLACs I've purchased. The max bitrate is very low.
Spotify just (last week or 2 weeks ago) introduced lossless compression (FLAC) and it sounds amazing.
Wow didn't know about that, thanks.
tidal is a thing and can be scraped the same way. I wonder how big that collection would be as it can go from 50mb to 300mb for 3min
Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?
Spotify pays the rightsholders. What are they supposed to do about the shitty contracts that the artists signs with the labels?
I am providing my own music on Spotify via a distributor I a pay 50 Euros once. What do I get from Spotify? Basically nothing! It is not the rightholders as I am the rightholder! Spotify is a scam for artist.
They don't pay any artist who has less than 1000/Streams per Song per Year.
They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments.
Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify.
If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch.
I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about.
Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
yeah it's wild to me how folks will defend the current status quo when it's clearly broken.
people defend convenience way too much. spotify isn't good for us and spotify-like-streaming is destroying the music industry.
this argument is so tired.
most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em.
Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars.
youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money.
now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.
> most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control.
Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
It takes time and effort to receive money, especially from consumers worldwide. Most hobbyists would not going to deal with all the complexity in it.
I think it was was Les Claypool (of the band Primus) who said on some podcast that recording a studio album with its attendant very non-trivial costs is really just creating a very expensive business card to hand out to prospective clients.
Back then, that is. It probably cost $250k in 1990 for them to record Frizzle Fry in a studio, handwave $500k in 2025 dollars. But Bandcamp on MacBook and some gear from GuitarStudio, round to $15k and your time. neither of which isn't trivial or cheap, but it's not 1990 no more.
> I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales.
i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture.
Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream.
That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams.
I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly.
also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists.
piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.
Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b.
Youtube also paid out literally 50x more to creators in 2024 than Patreon had total subscriptions on the platform.
These big platform payouts matter a lot.
> This is not small potatoes
Unless you're a small potato. Approximately 0% of what I pay for spotify goes to the artists I actually listen to. Fucking Taylor Swift and the Beatles estate don't need my money.
As a reasonably known but not super popular bluegrass artist, I agree: please steal my music instead of paying Spotify for it.
Hell, Weird Al himself only made $12 from Spotify views in 2023.
To rights owners, not to artists. It's not a trivial difference. Ask Taylor Swift.
Some quick Googling shows 1 million streams pays approx $2000.
You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.
be aware that payout rates change based on tiers and a bunch of other factors. So, it would likely take more than 40 million streams to earn $80k.
I believe Weird Al posted his streaming revenue a few years ago. He had something like 80 million streams and said he earned about $12. https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/weird-al-yankovic-wrappe...
There is a reason people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly, it's how they make money. Weird Al is known for his amazing live shows, there's a reason for it: they make more money.
Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.
Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).
> Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.
What are the rough rates for each pool? That's the important part here. And how many artists are far enough from the average ratio that the detail of two pools matters.
https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/ This site says $0.00238 is typical for "worldwide" and a lot more than that for US and Europe specifically.
I'd be interested in knowing that too, as far as I know Spotify doesn't publish details to the public at least.
But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India.
Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices.
We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already.
Anything that gives different value to different artists is probably going to favor the big ones and just make things worse.
CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it.
The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.
I do think allocating money per-account or something should be better. Don't let a constant listener allocate the royalties from ten other people.
Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.
The Pudding had a nice article explaining how streaming revenue is distributed: https://pudding.cool/2022/06/streaming/
When he says "so if I'm doing the math right that means I earned $12" I interpret that as him exaggerating for effect. It's definitely not him citing the pay slip.
"$2 or more per thousand streams, split across rightsholders" seems like an accurate estimate.
That seems reasonable?
Assume an artist (either directly or through a rights holder) makes 1/3 income from streaming, 1/3 from merch and physical albums, and 1/3 from live events.
40m streams per year would be 800k per week. 200k fans worldwide playing 4 times per week on average could get you there. Thats like a decent sized but not enormous youtube channel.
200k fans worldwide would also support the ticket sales and merchandise sales aspects.
You only need 5000 fans to buy your CD/album/w.e at $15 to make 80k
Per year, which is a big lift compared to them pressing play on Spotify
Yeah but you need a quarter million people every week according to that guy. That will drop off over time.
But you only need to record your song once and get money forever. Nobody pays me per function invocation in production, that would be very nice
99% of that 10 billion went to a handful of artists. Actually, I'd wager nearly half of it went to labels and other middlemen, but that's beside the point. The vast majority of money in the music industry never trickles down, ever.
edit: I looked it up, 70% of spotify's payouts go directly to labels, not artists. So...that $10 bil is nothing.
This is by design and it's the same broken system that metallica defended in the 90s/00s because it benefits large artists while fucking over the other 99%.
We keep repeating the same script using the same busted short term logic.
Labels suck but when we're considering the merits of Spotify it's not their fault and artists can put music on the service without an abusive label.
Weird Al pointed out in 2023 that his 80 million Spotify views that year netted him $12 - enough for a nice sandwich.
Ah so you're only stealing a bit of money from the artists. That's ok then.
Touring makes almost no money. Only concerts with >1000ppl make money. Below that you can assume not even the sound engineer gets paid.
Not true at all. I support small artists and it's the only way they make money. Ticket sales and merch make up the vast majority of artist revenue for artists who arent in the top 1%. Most musicians don't make money if they aren't touring or selling merch somehow.
there's also the invaluable aspect of networking that touring allows. bit of a tangent, but it's very important for musicians to network.
The exception are musicians who do production stuff. Think movie/tv scores, commercials, etc. I actually know a handful of artists who used to tour quite a lot but eventually settled down to do production stuff. So they transitioned from touring to make money to production. Touring all year with no healthcare catches up to people.
I know a number of musicians that tour nightclubs, small venues, and festivals.
They make a living; not a luxurious one, but they do OK. They just enjoy making music, and feel that it's worth it. Many of them never even record their music.
Just cite facebook getting busted training its AI on torrents proven to contain unlicensed material lol
Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?
This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
What, precisely, is the point you’re trying to make here?
Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"
I hope readers will feel our frustration.
Well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
I'm reminded of the Zero One Infinity rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule)
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
How does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There's virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.
Personally as an artist I'd rather give it to people directly for free but I'll meet the audience where they are. The "compensation" does not factor into it at all.
Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)
updated - thank you commenters for making it clear that my sentiment was not clear
Spotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.
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.
>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.
Notably 160kbit is the free-tier bitrate, so they presumably used unpaid accounts.
> I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
Do they have DRM at all? Youtube and Pandora don't.
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.
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).
It's called playplay. It's used for protecting their new lossless files. But the first rule of playplay is you can't talk about playplay. https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-dismantles-spotifydl-track-...
YouTube Music uses Widevine.
If it's on YouTube Music, it's also on... YouTube.
Not necessarily at the same quality though.
I assume in most cases they're literally the same files. Youtube runs "topic" channels for music that distributors have sent it.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g (same thing, but on an official channel instead)
You can load any youtube music song on youtube by just removing the "music" subdomain.
Then why do you say they might not be the same files?
Let me start over. Youtube itself has DRM required for certain videos, and certain formats of videos.
The 256 kbps format for music will be protected by DRM. If you do not have DRM available youtube will fallback to a lower quality format to play the auduo.
Music might have higher quality audio-only files as provided where Youtube might have it combined with video and a generic compression algorithm applied as with all other uploaded videos.
>> But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Didn't Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They're too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.
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.
> They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook [...]
I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement.
First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt.
Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
Anthropic had to pay $1.5 billion recently so you're incorrect. I'm sure more of such cases will come up against big tech too.
It's obviously more profitable to pay the fine than to not do the illegal thing in the first place, so I am correct.
Just like with anything digital you (and Spotify) are fully at the mercy of the rights holders. When (not if) they pull their stuff, or replace their stuff, or change their stuff, you can never get the original back unless you preserve it.
Largest example: a lot of Russian music is not available on Spotify because of the Russia-Ukrane war, and Spotify pulling out of Russia. So they don't have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.
Id be stunned if we didn't find out Anna's Archive is a front for a handful of shadier VCs who are into AI. Even if AA themselves don't know it and just take the cash.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners
Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that Google controls this.)