alt Hacker NewsA big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.
True, but feature parity isn’t required for competition. Plenty of subscribers will just be listening to what they know they want to listen to, and for them a giant DB of music is absolutely sufficient.