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Backing up Spotify

annas-archive.li

601–610 of 732 posts

Re: Backing up Spotify

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it. That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.

Under the current system people can release everything they want as free use. How much media that the average person choses to consume is this 'free use' media? How much is media that artists chose to make money from?

This doesn't do much for the argument that artists only do art for money. Everyone knows what happens to free use art, same as what happens to FOSS: corpos bundle it up and sell it back to people.

By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#603
post #464
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.

No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta". The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB. After they too…

> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.

Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.

The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#604
post #580
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 promote…

The worldwide median internet download bandwidth is about 100 Mbps, which is far enough for HD or bluray video. The technical barrier can be as low as 'click to search, click to download' in some user-friendly BT clients. That being said, the price of these subscriptions is a problem that actually needs to be solved.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#605
post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify is banking on AI music Are they?

Yes, they actively promote playlists with AI music to corner the "chill work" music without having to pay anything to musicians.

Ah yes. The reason is because all the money is in the chill music. And not in the fact that the most formulaic genres get flooded with easily generated music ("chill work" music especially doesn't even need sophisticated AI, a random number generator would work).

And that's before we ask the question of how to identify AI-generated music (no one asks that question, but everyone wants it removed).

Re: Backing up Spotify

#606
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I'm still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it's specific to genres, but I haven't encountered any generated junk tracks.

Since relatively recently I'm getting AI music in my automatic radio. They look/sound like soulless facsimiles of the real thing.

It depends on the algorithm which often preferences "similarity" (for whatever definition of similarity is).

This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen through.

So you can really fall through the rabbit hole.

[1] He Talked A Big Game, Played A Small Tune by Dumpster Grooves. A better song than most human slop that sells stadiums. https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=mPBgJ_qO2AF80FGP

Re: Backing up Spotify

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like. Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much…

(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid. (b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as…

There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).

Re: Backing up Spotify

#608
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…

It takes time and effort to receive money, especially from consumers worldwide. Most hobbyists would not going to deal with all the complexity in it.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#609
post #99

I just want to be able to backup my playlists. Maybe thats possible but last time I looked I could only find sites that wanted your login, not gonna happen.

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.)

You can also do this with your human brain, which doesn't require 1 MWh or a thousand gallons of water to write a script to pipe API results to jq.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#610

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…

This, indeed, has mostly implications for ML, training, etc. As otherwise the whole catalog is available to partners, but costs a lot. So Anna did indeed liberate the content, but I'm definitely not switching off my Spotify subscription, even though, in my personal taste, neither quality, nor UI does match Apple Music. It is still useful to have s.o. serve the content for you.
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