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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#501

Post by yoan9224 »

The metadata alone is incredibly valuable for researchers. Having 186 million ISRCs catalogued with associated genre, tempo, and popularity data is a goldmine for music analysis that doesn't even require touching the audio files.

  I've always found it interesting how streaming services have become the de facto music library of record, yet they can and do remove content at will. When Spotify pulled out of Russia, entire catalogs became inaccessible. Physical media and personal archives suddenly matter again in ways we thought were obsolete.

  The copyright discussion is complex, but from a pure preservation standpoint, I'm glad someone is doing this work.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#502

Post by wintermutestwin »

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…

Why do you want a megacorp to tell you what to listen to!?? There are a million ways to do discovery where some enshitified corp isn’t incentivized to push something at you.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#503

Post by sbarre »

LunaSea wrote: post #452
troupo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bit in the blog post about the amount of music uploaded yearly to Spotify was shocking.

I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#504

Post by crazygringo »

emsixteen wrote: post #478
crazygringo wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where ChatGPT shines. Just ask it to write you a script, it'll give you all the instructions. I've used ChatGPT to write a whole bunch of playlist logic scripts (e.g. create a playlist that takes tracks from playlists A, B and C, but exclude tracks in playlist D.)

I worry about potential bans from scraping files through this sort of thing.

No files are involved. It's about backing up the metadata -- your playlists, liked songs.

So you can recreate the playlists on another Spotify account or another music service.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#505

Post by zarzavat »

urbandw311er wrote: post #471
lysace wrote: post #247

[flagged]

I have absolutely no idea why you’re being downvoted. This feels like exactly the sort of project that would be backed by the current Russian administration, given it serves to damage and destabilise businesses in countries that are currently hostile to Russia. — it’s not even a controversial take to say so.

Was Obama funding Aaron Swartz's efforts to scrape JSTOR?

Some people have the personality trait of loving to build collections or archives. Either for idealistic reasons (knowledge deserves to be free) or just because it's fun.

When that personality trait intersects with technical ability, we get projects such as the Internet Archive, Archive Team, Library Genesis, etc. There is no reason to assume state sponsorship, and 2/3 of those definitely aren't state sponsored.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#506

Post by sbarre »

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…

> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there

So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.

I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.

They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.

No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#507

Post by cluckindan »

zarzavat wrote: post #500
cluckindan wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting if that is considered to be copyrightable. Any white noise track is perceptually indistinguishable from another, but none have the exact same sequence of samples except by chance, or if the noise generator happens to be deterministic as a function of time.

White noise isn't copyrightable.

Then how is silence copyrightable?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#508

Post by IshKebab »

cakealert wrote: post #310
justatdotin wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect more data to make ai music generation better

When they say "worse" they do mean the AI will get better which will be worse because they are ideologically opposed to AI.

I'm not ideologically opposed to AI. The problem will get worse because while the quality of the music will improve, it will still be bad and there will also be a lot more of it.

We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing.

If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#509

Post by Thaxll »

DUDOS wrote: post #118
WD-42 wrote: post #7

Incredible. > A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. They wont and shouldn’t divulge the details, but I imagine that would be a fun read!

How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.

I mean 300TB is nothing for a streaming service, like it woudn't even show on a dashboard. They probably did that over weeks which is invisible.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#510

Post by sbarre »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #502
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…

Why do you want a megacorp to tell you what to listen to!?? There are a million ways to do discovery where some enshitified corp isn’t incentivized to push something at you.

I think perhaps the assumption of the OP (I know mine was in the early days) was that "discovery" on Spotify would involve human tastemakers and some kind of dynamic aggregation of peer tastes that could lead to organic discovery of new music, no matter how niche or obscure.

As opposed to what it has now devolved into: the most basic of similarity matching always showing you the same few hundred songs, combined with increasingly numerous paid placements.

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