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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#571

Post by squigz »

xandrius wrote: post #496

Truly amazing work. I couldn't help but being sad of the less popular songs not being currently stored, as those are definitely the ones more in risk of being lost forever. If you like the goal and you have even a few 100gb available on your server, consider "donating" some of that space to seeding the data (music or books). It's absolutely how we can fight the system, even if just a tiny bit. https://annas-archive.o…

Going off the blog post, archiving the rest of Spotify (which only represents 0.4% of total listens) would bring the total size up to something like 1PB, and would likely include a huge amount of AI generated stuff, which I don't think is worth it. I'd rather see them focus resources on archiving other stuff.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#572

Post by squigz »

aerozol wrote: post #566
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…

It would be reasonably trivial to set up a bot that mass-imports metadata from Spotify to MusicBrainz (note that MB rules do not allow this, community cleanup from a single user doing this with another source, years ago, is still ongoing). The value that MusicBrainz adds is the community editor who spent a few hours going through YouTube videos and wayback machine social links to figure out that Fog (Wellington, NZ,…

I was wondering if MB had any rules on such things. I get the motivation, but I hope they'd be willing to work with some trusted editors to figure out if this data would be useful/could be imported without risking quality.

But MB is one of the best resources out there - precisely because of what you said - so I'm not complaining too much :)

Re: Backing up Spotify

#573

Post by locusofself »

linhns wrote: post #378

Unlike books, which are massively overpriced, this will hurt artists a lot as they need the fees paid by Spotify to make ends meet.

I hate spotify as a company but I agree, at least in my case, a large share of my wife's income comes from spotify.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#574

Post by locusofself »

barnabee wrote: post #460
cm2012 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My wife is in her 40s, doesn't tour anymore, and makes a good chunk of her income from spotify.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#575

Post by alxndr »

Etheryte wrote: post #61
VanTheBrand wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.

FWIW archive.org has a lot of live music as well

Re: Backing up Spotify

#577

Post by Dylan16807 »

vintermann wrote: post #564
Dylan16807 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram. CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices. We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already. Anything that gives different value to…

CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it. The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.

I do think allocating money per-account or something should be better. Don't let a constant listener allocate the royalties from ten other people.

Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#578

Post by sejje »

morsch wrote: post #468
kefabean wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s if they pretend to stream the music. If they are using throwaway free accounts I imagine they can download the DRM-stripped files much more quickly.

True, but I could see them rate limiting that much more aggressively than streaming.

You can download playlists for offline use, it'll go pretty fast. I doubt they monitor it that hard.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#579

Post by 0x3f »

klez wrote: post #476
0x3f wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime. > but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations? Well this is an appeal to consequences, right…

> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.

If we're purely talking about music then almost everything is on YouTube, which has a subscription cost of $0/mo.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#580

Post by 0x3f »

lurk2 wrote: post #485
0x3f wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime. > but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations? Well this is an appeal to consequences, right…

> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions. > But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them? Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically l…

> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.

I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.

> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.

I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.

We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.

I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.

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