The people I know who go through the trouble of pirating and downloading vast libraries of music are all musicians themselves, or at the very least total music nerds. They don’t want to lose access to their stuff, plus if they ever need to import audio into a DAW, DRM is a no-go. They are the same people who spend large amounts of money on vinyls, and support smaller independent artists through concerts, merch and (back in the day) CDs.

It used to be more mixed, but today, piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.

Music piracy is already a thing, not to mention you don't even need to torrent nowadays when music is available for free on YouTube. Those who don't want to pay already don't pay so nothing changes there.

The value of Spotify is the convenience, and this collection does not change that in any way. Your argument would apply if someone were to make a Spotify clone with the same UX using this data.

The idea is that the streamers and major labels cannot be trusted to keep this available for future generations, so if we want to preserve our shared culture we should take matters into our own hands.

I think the negatives for artists are minimal while the benefits of preserving a annotated snapshot of contemporary music for future generations is very valuable.

Don't worry, they let Spotify keep the original files.

Spotify can shut down any day. Even if it survives, it's removing content all the time. How are future generations supposed to study and listen to music if it is lost? Imho, someone has to do it.

Nobody is gonna download a 300TB torrent just to get the latest Taylor Swift album. There are much easier avenues than that.

What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.

Buy CDs. Use Bandcamp.

Stealing is not the correct word.

Why is this stealing? You can already listen to everything that's on Spotify with a free account. You are free to also record the audio while it's playing. I suppose grabbing the actual file should't matter? Or is this about releasing? And robbing people of plays they would otherwise get through Spotify?

Spotify used pirated songs initially when they started it. So...

While I wouldn't call this scummy I do agree with your sentiment. It is technically stealing and those copyrights should be respected.

Full disclosure, I am a career musician AND have been known to pirate material. That said, I think this is a valuable archive to build. There are a lot of recordings that will not endure without some kind of archiving. So while it's not a perfect solution, I do think it has an important role to play in preservation for future generations.

Perhaps it's best to have a light barrier to entry. Something like "Yes, you can listen to these records, but it should be in the spirit of requesting the material for review, and not just as a no-pay alternative to listening on Spotify." Give it just enough friction where people would rather pay the $12/month to use a streaming service.

Also, it's not like streaming services are a lucrative source of income for most artists. I expect the small amount of revenue lost to listeners of Anna's Archive are just (fractions of) a penny in the bucket of any income that a serious artist would stand to make.

Hey, you should look up how Spotify got started. :)

Ageee with you, this release is obviously a scummy thing to do.

Same as if someone released every book on Kindle for free. There are rules. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.

Not to mention the organization is openly trying to profit from this data by selling it to big tech orgs for AI training! None of the artists consented to that, I am sure, to say nothing if Spotify's interests.

On top of that they beg for donations.