- cross-posted to:
- datahoarder@lemmy.ml
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- datahoarder@lemmy.ml
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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- Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
- We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
- For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
- For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.
Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn’t the focus be on getting the least popular music first?
Unfortunately if you sort by least popular musicon Spotify, you’ll get nothing but spam
I agree. I seed torrents/files that took me a long time to finish.
The politics of preservation is definitely an interesting one. I suppose one argument in favor of preserving more popular music is that there are going to be fewer popular tracks than unpopular tracks - and they’re already at 300TB, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it’s a third the size of their existing library of ebooks.
It depends on what your goal is: If you want to preserve the music that is important to most people or to the era, you should start with the most popular stuff. And Spotify has a big spam problem. Everybody who thinks he is a DJ wants his music to be on there and there is so much AI music flooding the scene. So it does make sense to backup what people are actually listening and not some AI-generated music spam nobody cares about.
I mean, they say earlier that music is actually well-preserved, but it’s disproportionately popular music. If the goal is then to preserve everything, I’d expect them to go for stuff that isn’t likely to be in some random audiophile’s collection or whatever then.
If we were talking about the ethnic music of an extinct tribe that uses a language on risk of disappearing, sure, you would be right.
But think about it for a bit longer. They are just a commercial production that had no cultural impact in a population. They are still getting preserved in a format with a quality degradation that is imperceptible to the human ear. That’s usually enough. Audiophiles are usually overzealous about fidelity preservation. But the efforts are often misguided and discussions abound on technical topics that ultimately don’t matter.
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.
Does this mean the MusicBrainz database will soon go from 5 million to 186 million tracks?
If I ran mb, I would be cautious importing the data directly. I’m sure Spotify would consider it trade information and go after anyone directly using it. However if a few million people added the tracks with individual edits then it probably won’t take too long.
I thought metadata couldn’t be copyrighted though?
That’s exactly what I was wondering too.
Acquiring high quality music is already easy enough in most cases.
What I am interested in is the metadata. Accurate tagging of all my files is of high interest.
Probably not worth it to store the AI tracks
Asking the real questions here…
The data they compiled is really cool.
If reading the chart right, the genera with the most artists is opera.
Even if they didn’t have the music files, the analysis on the metadata is insane.
Publicly admitting they are the origin of the torrents is definitely
a riskyan insane move. I don’t think they want Sony going after them, but also fuck Sony for locking art behind shitty contracts that forces these kind of projects to exist.The 3 major labels are equally predatory not only Sony
Publicly admitting they are the origin of the torrents is definitely a risky an insane move. I don’t think they want Sony going after them
Let’s be honest: Everybody is trying to go after Annas Archive. Every book publisher wants to get them, the US government, too and it really doesn’t matter if every music publisher wants them also. I hope that they are based in a country where the western systems can’t get them
Yeah, it’s a wild move admitting that they are the source of pirated content for music here.
We don’t need Anna’s Archive to go under as a result of Sony going after them because of this…
They have had a dozen or more lawsuits/police actions against them. They are already enemy #1 in piracy terms, so I expect they are okay leaning into it and doing more good for the world.
I’ll strongly suggest to take out all the cheaply AI generated music from this “back up” and save themselves some space.
I’m not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too
You could cut off your search around the time AI tracks started to appear. Not sure when that was, maybe 2023. You’d miss a lot of recent stuff, but you’d filter out a lot of spam too
do you have any numbers on the AI share? I doubt it’s more than a 2%, so I assume you are just virtue signalling on a completely unrelated topic here :-)
AI slop can be made and distributed in ginourmous numbers. I wouldn’t be suprised if at least 3/4 of uploads from the past 2 years are AI.
See, 75% of output of 2 years vs 100 years of music production. Also popularity was factored in.
A bot could put 100 AI generated tracks on Spotify per hour. 50 bots doing the same is 120,000 tracks per day.
can you run me the numbers for 200 bots?
There’s definitely gonna be some crazy guy who will put this on their server and stream it to their phones lol
Just a random question. What would the cost be?
I stream mine through Plexamp. Up to almost 400k tracks.
If I had an extra 300 tb I’d do it.
My first though as well
Oh im thinking of it lol
Hi it’s me
This is the one thing on Spotify I can’t get elsewhere. Would be nice to have a non transcode copy.
https://open.spotify.com/album/4emoC6C9fCDkWPdTuxN9an
…Like Cologne (Spotify Exclusive)
Queens of the Stone Age
2013 • 3 songs • 14 min 5 secdeleted by creator
Well, since this archive says it contains the original ogg @160kbps for all artists with a popularity >0, it’ll be in this collection. Your wait may be over soon.
sweet
try OnTheSpot.
Does it circumvent the drm, or does it re-encode decompressed audio?
don’t ask me, I don’t know specifically how it works. I just know with a premium spotify account it’ll give you 320kbps mp3s, without, you’re limited to 128kbps. Sets the album artwork and the tags automatically, it’s great.
Second. I’ve built most of my library from this and soulseek over the last few years.
If I recall correctly, Spotify streams ogg vorbis—not mp3, so that would be a transcode.
well, there is an option for “raw media download”, so I’m assuming turning that on will get you the .ogg files you seek if that’s important to you. I honestly don’t care that much as 320kbps .mp3s sound as good as anything else to me.
Spotify is why I set up a Funkwhale server
Is funkwhale also a sort of soulseek?
No. Soulseek is old school P2P. All you need to do is run the client software, set a local shared folder, and your are client and server in one. Funkwhale is more like running your own Lemmy instance and building a community. The difference between them is like the difference between using Airdrop or Syncthing to share files and hosting hosting your own domain and server.
Like share with friends sort of?
AFAIK: Yes. But it’s supposedly a pain to set up, so I’ll never know the difference.
TBH I plan to migrate off Funkwhale to something more featureful and yea it was a bit of complex set up. Props to the devs tho, it’s open source, stable, and does what it says on the tin
Ok, thanks
Oh no, around here we mention esoteric software but we will never include any extra information in the post. If you know you know.
No need to play secret hacker around here lol 😊
Soulseek afict requires dedicated clients. The Subsonic standard is supported by more & more mobile/PC apps, I wish it was supported
Damn, boy! That’s a big ass music collection.
So the artists get paid even less than from Spotify?
Well, we are talking pennies here so… /s
It’s not just Spotify, it content is free for all, then who is buying?
a few years ago, back when I was still using Spotify, I checked my Wrapped and apparently I was using Spotify more than 99.5% of users in my country, and when it came to my most listened artist, I was in top 0.05% listeners worldwide. doing some back-of-the-napkin math with the data I got online about Spotify’s payouts, it turned out the money the artist got during that year from me amounted to
less thanjust a bit over a dollar.if you’re really concerned about supporting artists, use the money you’d pay for your music streaming subscription and buy their album or a piece of merch every two months.
Yeah, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say “steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch”.
I’ve also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.
An unexpected side effect of this is that because I’m aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery
I’ve had Spotify since it basically released. I fully switched to a self hosted music library about 5 months ago. I imagine I’ve supported artists more in those 5 months than I did during my 18-ish years of Spotify premium. I still use Soulseek for large artists or quite old albums, but most new releases and remix tracks I pay for.
How many buyers are there
isif entire archive is available for free? 10? 20?okay so this next bit might shock you, but there’s already a HUGE amount of music available on Youtube for everyone to search through and listen to with just a few click. and in addition to that, there’s the Soulseek network, countless torrent trackers – both public and private – that let you download entire discographies, as well as Youtube download tools, websites and tools that let you rip music from streaming services. and all of those are free! more than that, they have been around for years! and before that, people would download songs from Limewire or Kazaa or Napster, tape songs from radio, or buy bootleg albums. and somehow, there’s still people buying music and T-shirts from their favourite bands, and paying to attend their concerts. absolutely bonkers.
It might shock you, but content on YouTube gets paid. And illegal sources out there don’t make it more legal to share it. It’s funny though, you are basically saying what? Listen for free, middle finger to authors, and buy merchandise? As opposite to listen legally, authors get something and buy merchandise? But hey, I’m glad that you speak for authors.
It might shock you, but content on YouTube gets paid
similar fraction of pennies as in Spotify’s case, and often the people who receive the money aren’t the people behind the content, especially when it comes to older or less popular music, because it’s been uploaded by some random guy 14 years ago.
you are basically saying what? Listen for free, middle finger to authors, and buy merchandise? As opposite to listen legally, authors get something and buy merchandise?
no, my good guy, I say middle finger to Spotify and their warmongering, slop-embracing, Joe-Rogan-loving business, and spend money in a way that skips at least one middle man which hopefully results in the artist getting a bigger cut, and in you actually owning something even when the company you’ve bought from goes down, rather than renting it.
But hey, I’m glad that you speak for authors.
right back atcha!
Who’s fault is it that there’s no fair systems one could use (except maybe bandcamp)? Not mine at least, I don’t use Spotify at all. I would not sell my music there if I would be an artist.
I don’t use Spotify, either. And do what you want to do, nobody is forcing your to put your music on Spotify.
I’m guessing this is more about preserving culture and art. I find it unlikely that this post would be someone’s first clue that they could listen to music for free, and listening to music out of this dump would be way harder than any other method.
You underestimate people and their motivation to listen for free no matter what.
Its mostly Sony, UMG, and all the other leeches who would get paid less for their share holders.
I dont feel like editing the image but imagine the guy with most of the cookies in this picture was UMG and the artists are the guy on the right.
Yes, sure, but if those don’t get paid, artists don’t get paid. And artists are not forced to pick a label, they are free to go solo, but they still prefer labels, so it’s not that black and white labels bad, artists good
Well if you genuinely care about seeing artists get paid the ones who need it most tend to make their conent available already for free on bandcamp or similar services, and have physical albums and merch you can buy.
Last night i spent $10 on 3 albums on bandcamp, those artists each made more on that single purchase then they would from thousands of streams.
Spotify making less (or more) money does not trickle down to artists on a per stream basis.
Dont be a corporate bootlicker. Say it with me now, "If buying isnt owning Piracy is not stealing. "
I’m not sure how you think Spotify compensation works, but it is not a “one stream and you get paid”-deal, but rather a revenue share model where artists are compensated from a large pool by total streams. The main share of your Spotify monthly subscription that goes to compensating artists goes to Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny etc. Being a top listener to your favorite, but underground band contributes negligibly to what they actually get paid.
If you care about their compensation, buy the album as directly from them as possible, or buy merch/go to concerts, and recommend their msuic to other people so they might end up paying customers. Subscribing to Spotify and thinking they get a fair deal out of that is not the way, and increasingly not the way (with their GenAI-shenanigans).
First, what am I using is beyond the point and I’m not using Spotify because of their payment method and their politics. And again, if albums are on streaming services, they are voluntarily there, are they not?
How voluntary is it when these platforms have a monopolistic grasp on how consumers access music these days? And the more people believe that the artists are actually fairly compensated from this model, the firmer this grasp becomes. What choice do they have of being there if they want to have any kind of reach?
A Spotify Premium subscriptions will cost someone 156€ a year. If that person instead spent that entire music budget on purchasing albums from select musicians according to the enjoyment they derive from their works, or buy concert tickets or merch, and decides to pirate the rest of their music listening, what changes? For the consumer, they are now left with actual, irrevocable access (legal and illegal) to the same music you had rented access to before, and have spent the same amount of money. For the musicians, the ones who received the purchases are left with much more of your dedicated music spend, and the rest will have marginally less (their share based on total streams of your monthly subscription x12). For Spotify and Taylor Swift, they receive marginally less money (but more than the artists you actually listen to) of which they should probably not have received to begin with.
Oo, I’ll have to check those when they release. I follow some artists that only upload to YouTube and Spotify, neither of which is ideal.
