Backing up Spotify

How legal is this with regards to copyright laws?

New multimodal training set just dropped.

Very interesting that a white noise track for babies is the 4th most popular track on Spotify.

I want to time-travel back to 2000 like Old Biff with the sports almanac so I can tell Shawn Fanning to use the "it's for historical preservation" defense.

We need insane for culture to survive.

> ≥70% of songs are ones almost no one ever listens to (stream count < 1000).

So much interesting but undiscovered music is out there!

This is conspiracy theory territory but I wonder if big tech is sponsoring efforts like this as an easy way to get training data.

`spotdl download "https://open.spotify.com/user/{username}" --user-auth --output '{list-name}/{title} - {artists}.{output-ext}'`

This is literally all you need to back up Spotify.

Just buy music DRM-free in the first place.

I really don't understand how focusing on source quality files is supposed to be a "major issue" with the music preservation community. It's bizarre for them to talk about these being barriers for creating a "full archive of all music that humanity has ever produced" have and their answer be scraping Spotify to end up with a music library comprised of many AI and bulk produced songs at 75/160kbps.

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

error 451 https://postimg.cc/QFddnW41

If only Spotify paid musicians their fair share

199GB, only metadata released for now.

Magnet link found here: https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify

Are magnet links allowed on HN?

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

Is this all regions? I'm assuming so but I can't be sure

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

is there a torrent client already that is be good at partial downloads? I didn't realize how popcorn time worked until I read this thread.

Looking at the analysis, I'm totally surprised opera and psytrance are so prolific.

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.

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

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

Now, anyone with some decent info on signal processing and machine learning can build his/her own Shazam.

I hope they get the new lossless versions

For a fully-legal alternative of metadata archiving, I suggest the iTunes EPF (Enterprise Partner Feed). https://performance-partners.apple.com/epf

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.

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

free the music

Congrats! I’m sure the Spotify lawyers are gonna have some sleepless nights ahead.

is this not highly illegal?

I wonder how definitive their collection is and how much ripping Google Music/YouTube would improve on this.

A distributed ripping project to do that would be a fine thing.

Yes, but do they have the one that goes like: to-to-to dotodoo? Hmmm? Do they?

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

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This reinforces my belief that this effort ("anna's...") is financially backed by Russia/Putin. The HN crowd probably won't see it though.

Think from a geopolitical perspective, not (just) a "copyright shouldn't exist" perspective. They claim "communism" as a motivation; Putin is looking to re-establish the Stalin Soviet Union.

Am I understanding this wrong? Ripping the metadata I'm fine with. But it sounds like they've ripped every song from Spotify and they're going to release them?

Edit: It seems like they are. Stealing from tens of thousands of artists, big and small, and calling it "preservation" or "archiving" is scummy.

Yuck. Just to make it easier to train slop machines. The point of art is not to have completionist archives of EVERYthing that’s ever been made! Let it die. Death is the most natural part of life. Art is about the human experience, not “for researchers”.

The point is human connection. Art is a living reflection and record of human experience. Art will persevere- the kinds of folks who prioritize what they like based on popularity were never the supporters artists (contrast with craftspeople trying to make a buck) counted on in the first place. Enjoy your derivative slop - we’ll continue on our imperfect, messy, individual, human artistic lives.

Unlike books, which are massively overpriced, this will hurt artists a lot as they need the fees paid by Spotify to make ends meet.