> I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.

Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.

> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.

I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.

I am flabbergasted by the comments here, Spotify started with pirated music and now invests in the military.

https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...

And

https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-millio...

It's probably up to the publishers, not them.

I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.

I don't know whether Spotify could agree to provide its entire library of music to an archive for Torrenting by anyone.

Its not just about Spotify, but the record labels and the artists themselves.

For a community that usually wants to allow artists control over their music, or better yet people control over their own information in general. It surprises me that people are now okay with music being scraped and freely put online.

Anna's archive offers to share their data for AI training (in exchange for donations), so that's certainly something the record labels want control of. https://annas-archive.org/llm

I don't think music producer would agree to that. Spotify would likely lose contracts even if they simply opted for silence.

To me it is the “in any way” at the end. I can’t possibly understand the blind desire to distort reality by using mere words.

Simply sharing metadata, related artists, genres, etc would create a pretty interesting ecosystem[1].

[1]: https://everynoise.com/

Not even in the “providing a way to get music” way?

Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.

Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.

They can't, their overlords would be very unhappy with it. Record industries are heavy in on DRM.