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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#211

Post by platevoltage »

SSLy wrote: post #98
rckclmbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore

I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk

Soulseek has to be the best kept secret on the internet. Even people my age who grew up with things like Napster, Limewire, and even soulseek, don’t know that it still exists.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#212

Post by tclancy »

SSLy wrote: post #98
rckclmbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore

I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk

I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#213

Post by nimih »

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…

What, precisely, is the point you’re trying to make here?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#214

Post by tclancy »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #58
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:…

True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.

Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).

Re: Backing up Spotify

#215

Post by dehrmann »

lkramer wrote: post #141
cm2012 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.

Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.

I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#216

Post by chrneu »

nospice wrote: post #170
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.…

> 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. I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money o…

> I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales.

i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture.

Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream.

That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams.

I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly.

also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists.

piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#217

Post by toomuchtodo »

lurk2 wrote: post #208
toomuchtodo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).

I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#218

Post by dmicah »

Spivak wrote: post #155
krick wrote: post #71

Uh, cool, I guess? I want to applaud that, but, first off, unless you are OpenAI or Facebook, it is not exactly plausibly easy to participate in the festivities. Even if I had spare 300 TB laying around, how the fuck do I download that? But, more importantly, I cannot even say "good for you", because I don't actually think it is good for Anna's Archive. I wouldn't touch that thing, if I was them. Do we even have any…

I am in no way saying that this is cheap but 300 TB will set you back a little less than $6k with tax. Very attainable for people other than OpenAI and Facebook. And it's not crazy at all to snag a server with enough bays to house all those.

For reference, considering you can purchase a 12-month Spotify Premium subscription via a $99 gift card at the moment, that same $6k could be used for 60 years of Spotify Premium.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#219

Post by chrneu »

cj wrote: post #182
cm2012 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some quick Googling shows 1 million streams pays approx $2000. You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.

be aware that payout rates change based on tiers and a bunch of other factors. So, it would likely take more than 40 million streams to earn $80k.

I believe Weird Al posted his streaming revenue a few years ago. He had something like 80 million streams and said he earned about $12. https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/weird-al-yankovic-wrappe...

There is a reason people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly, it's how they make money. Weird Al is known for his amazing live shows, there's a reason for it: they make more money.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#220

Post by kachnuv_ocasek »

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…

How does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There's virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.
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