Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backing up Spotify

annas-archive.li

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 732 posts

Re: Backing up Spotify

#451

Post by 47282847 »

gorbachev wrote: post #407

Quoting from their page: -------------- This is by far the largest music metadata database that is publicly available. For comparison, we have 256 million tracks, while others have 50-150 million. Our data is well-annotated: MusicBrainz has 5 million unique ISRCs, while our database has 186 million. -------------- If they truly are on a mission to protect world's information from disappearing, they should work with M…

> n either case, to make the data truly useful, they'd need to solve the problem on how to match the metadata to a fingerprint used to identify the music tracks

How is that a problem?

    for each track in collection do extract_fingerprint

Re: Backing up Spotify

#452

Post by LunaSea »

troupo wrote: post #197
fsckboy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumer it's an archive to defend against Spotify going away. Remember when Netflix had everything, and then that eroded and now you can only rely on stuff that Netflix produced itself? the average consumer will flock when Spotify ultimately enshitifies

Netflix didn't lose content by choice. Actual right holders decided to pull their content and create rival services. Has nothing to do with perceived enshittification by Netflix (even though they have enshittification too). Spotify is under the same threat: they have no content that they own. Everything is licensed.

Spotify is banking on AI music which is enough to tell you everything you need to know about the company, their C-suite and their opinion on music.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#454

Post by squigz »

grishka wrote: post #433
reassess_blind wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many premium accounts Anna’s Archive had to use to scrape the whole thing. Surely Spotify has scrape protection and wouldn’t allow a single account to stream (download) millions of separate tracks.

I haven't looked at the code but I would be surprised if the premium account "requirement" is anything more than an if statement that can be commented out.

Pretty sure that requirement is server-side?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#455

Post by dagss »

komali2 wrote: post #416
gosub100 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons. Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?

> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion? Yes, it is. It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't. What the cryp…

Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.

Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts

You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.

You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...

I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#456

Post by 47282847 »

lukan wrote: post #379
47282847 wrote: post #156

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…

Your ISP is filtering DNS records. Easily fixed by changing DNS. It may even speed up your lookups, as most ISP DNS are slower than the large ones like quad1/8/9.

> They are based in russia.

“Russian authorities have without any notice suspended Russia's most popular file-sharing website torrents.ru for the alleged violation of copyright laws.” (2010) https://www.petosevic.com/resources/news/2010/03/000350

“In 2016, for example, the Moscow City Court (Mosgorsud) granted more than 700 requests to protect intellectual property.” https://www.group-ib.com/blog/torrents/

“The ISPs in Russia are required to block subscriber access to thepiratebay.se and thepiratebay.mn following the complaint of […]” (2015) https://www.maverickeye.de/russia-has-ordered-local-isps-to-...

“Roskomnadzor, the country’s telecom and media industries regulating body wants people to pay, so in 2016 it’s going to block Russia’s 15 most popular torrent websites” https://www.inverse.com/article/9619-russia-will-crack-down-...

etc

There are plenty of Russian music labels. Big book publishers? Not so much. Some sites explicitly ban content from the hosting country to try and avoid that. Not the case here.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#457

Post by Griffinsauce »

kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #220
1dry wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally as an artist I'd rather give it to people directly for free but I'll meet the audience where they are. The "compensation" does not factor into it at all.

Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)

Re: Backing up Spotify

#458

Post by NoahZuniga »

oarfish wrote: post #360
virtualritz wrote: post #207

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.

Yeah this is actually quite nefarious, as it is a private organization that decides what sites get blocked, with no legal oversight. - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearingstelle_Urheberrecht_im... - https://netzpolitik.org/2024/cuii-liste-diese-websites-sperr... Its a DNS based block, so overriding your default DNS server is enough to circumvent it. I think Dns over Https also works.

Pretty sure this was a thing in the past, but that currently it has to be a court order.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#459

Post by DannyBee »

layer8 wrote: post #296
sneak wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ToS is not law except in the most draconian and authoritarian interpretations of the CFAA.

You are mistaken, it’s contract law.

Lawyer here -

A bunch of things:

1. You are all probably talking past each other - I expect the original question of legality was about criminal, and not civil, law.

2. I'm sure they did not view or sign the TOS to access this. You can't be bound to a contract you never view or intentionally assent to. At least in most countries/places.

For example, in the US I can show you tons of cases in just about every state and federal court where the court decided the TOS doesn't apply because it was never viewed or assented to.

IE cases like https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/nevada/nvdc...

(Ironically it works both ways, so if the contract provides you any guarantees, you can't take advantage of them to sue for breach if yuo never assented)

It's different if you can prove that they knew there was a TOS they would be bound by and just never bothered to look at the terms.

That is very hard to prove, and it does not suffice to prove that everybody has a TOS these days or whatever. You have to prove actual knowledge of a TOS by these particular defendants.

I use the US because it tends to be on the forefront of maximal browserwrap enforcement, so if it's not going to be enforced there, it's usually not going to be enforced anywhere

Re: Backing up Spotify

#460

Post by barnabee »

cm2012 wrote: post #131
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think that would be a good thing?

Everyone should just download all art, music and literature for free. Musicians, artists and writers can all make money some other way while I enjoy the works of their efforts.

Unironically yes?

Many artists already work this way. They are on Spotify et al. for reach not because it does anything meaningful for them financially. It’s not like your subscription fee is distributed fairly to the artists you listen to anyway[0].

To the extent they make money at all, it’s from touring, and selling physical media and merch.

The world under Spotify is about as financially bad for most artists as if everyone was pirating away.

If we all quit Spotify, pirated everything, and spent the money we saved buying things from the artists we were enjoying the most (from their own sites, Bandcamp, or at concerts), the artists and musicians would be much better off.

[0] Unless you only listen to the big stars who end up getting most of the payouts.

Post reply on HN