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Backing up Spotify

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371–380 of 732 posts

Re: Backing up Spotify

#372

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…

The metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably

Self-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don't give a damn is telling.

Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#373
post #179
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.

To rights owners, not to artists. It's not a trivial difference. Ask Taylor Swift.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#374
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…

Why haven't you unsubscribed then?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#375
post #219
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.

Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).

Re: Backing up Spotify

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno if they publish like a 10 TB torrent of the most popular music I can see people making their own music services. A 10 TB hard disk is easily affordable, and that's about 3 million songs which is way more than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, even if you reduce that by 100x to account for taste. It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...

I would expect more data to make ai music generation better

The problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators.

An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.

In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#377

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…

The first users of this dataset will be Big Tech corps. Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple will all be happy to use this dataset for training their LLMs.

For them, 300TB is just cheap

Re: Backing up Spotify

#379

Hmmm I don’t like this. There are sources for music with better quality out there and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution. I am worried about losing their ebook library. Quoting from the announcement: “Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved.“ They should have done this as a separate identity.

"and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution"

They are based in russia. And they currently do not work together so well with the west.

So it is imaginable, that if some people give Trump quite some money, to make Annas takedown part of some deal to lift sanctions after a ceasefire in Ukraine, but .. it does not seem like it. I rather suspect more effort in the west to block access to unwanted sites like this. My ISP in germany is already blocking it.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#380
post #379

Hmmm I don’t like this. There are sources for music with better quality out there and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution. I am worried about losing their ebook library. Quoting from the announcement: “Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved.“ They should have done this as a separate identity.

"and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution" They are based in russia. And they currently do not work together so well with the west. So it is imaginable, that if some people give Trump quite some money, to make Annas takedown part of some deal to lift sanctions after a ceasefire in Ukraine, but .. it does not seem like it. I rather suspect more effort in the west to block access to…

Trump threatened the EU to tax Spotify (and others) just this week. So it doesn’t look like Trump would be happy to help Spotify out, though in exchange for money he’ll probably change his mind.
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