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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#201

Post by chrneu »

earthnail wrote: post #183
chrneu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this argument is so tired. most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them. most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em. Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming.…

Touring makes almost no money. Only concerts with >1000ppl make money. Below that you can assume not even the sound engineer gets paid.

Not true at all. I support small artists and it's the only way they make money. Ticket sales and merch make up the vast majority of artist revenue for artists who arent in the top 1%. Most musicians don't make money if they aren't touring or selling merch somehow.

there's also the invaluable aspect of networking that touring allows. bit of a tangent, but it's very important for musicians to network.

The exception are musicians who do production stuff. Think movie/tv scores, commercials, etc. I actually know a handful of artists who used to tour quite a lot but eventually settled down to do production stuff. So they transitioned from touring to make money to production. Touring all year with no healthcare catches up to people.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#202

Post by toast0 »

flxy wrote: post #75
Etheryte wrote: post #28

To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering. [0] https:…

I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership…

> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.

Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.

Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#203

Post by fao_ »

1dry wrote: post #189
crazygringo wrote: post #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 researche…

Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more? This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wr…

Spotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#204

Post by chrneu »

cm2012 wrote: post #179
chrneu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this argument is so tired. most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them. most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em. Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming.…

Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b. Youtube also paid out literally 50x more to creators in 2024 than Patreon had total subscriptions on the platform. These big platform payouts matter a lot.

99% of that 10 billion went to a handful of artists. Actually, I'd wager nearly half of it went to labels and other middlemen, but that's beside the point. The vast majority of money in the music industry never trickles down, ever.

edit: I looked it up, 70% of spotify's payouts go directly to labels, not artists. So...that $10 bil is nothing.

This is by design and it's the same broken system that metallica defended in the 90s/00s because it benefits large artists while fucking over the other 99%.

We keep repeating the same script using the same busted short term logic.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#207

Post by virtualritz »

I just found out that https://annas-archive.li/ is masked by my German internet provider (SIM.de/Drillisch). I usually use a VPN but I had it switched off temp. to watch Fallout (Prime Video won't let you watch through a VPN). Only when I switched Mullvad back on could I open the site.

I didn't know German providers do this.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#208

Post by lurk2 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #143
jsheard wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies. They have a page directly addressed to AI companies, offering them "enterprise-level" access to their complete archives in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. AI may not be their original/primary motivation but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing.

You go where the money is. Infra isn’t free. Churches pass the plate every Sunday. Perhaps one day we’ll exist in a more optimal socioeconomic system; until then, you do what you have to do to accomplish your goals (in this context, archivists and digital preservation).

> Infra isn’t free.

There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#209

Post by nickthegreek »

layer8 wrote: post #152
vlaaad wrote: post #57

Unrelated, but I just can't stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I'm a paying customer. Fuck you Spotify. You were supposed to be a convenient way to discover and listen to music. Now you are only convenient for listening to music, and absolutely terrible for any recommendations. This is sad really. Spotify had good recommendations. It's absolutely in a position where it can provide good…

YouTube Music works pretty well for me. One great feature is that it includes not just a commercial music streaming catalog, but all user uploads of music on YouTube.

and you can upload 100,000 of your own tracks to the service for your private use as well. It is a great service considering I am getting it as a side effect of youtube premium. Single handedly the last subscription I would cancel.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#210

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

vlaaad wrote: post #57

Unrelated, but I just can't stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I'm a paying customer. Fuck you Spotify. You were supposed to be a convenient way to discover and listen to music. Now you are only convenient for listening to music, and absolutely terrible for any recommendations. This is sad really. Spotify had good recommendations. It's absolutely in a position where it can provide good…

I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I'm still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it's specific to genres, but I haven't encountered any generated junk tracks.
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