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Backing up Spotify

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11–20 of 732 posts

Re: Backing up Spotify

#11
This is insane.

I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.

The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.

But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?

Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. Or if the major record labels already license their entire catalogs for training purposes cheaply enough, so this really is just solely intended as a preservation effort?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#16

[flagged]

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.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#17

[flagged]

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.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#18
post #10

[flagged]

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?

If you listen to something on Spotify with a free account the artists still get paid. This isn't a case where you're ripping off so mega-corp. You're ripping off thousands of artists from major label ones to tiny indies. Take the metadata and build something cool. Stealing the files and releasing them is something else entirely.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#20
post #16

[flagged]

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.

How about we let the individual artists decide?
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