Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.
> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.
I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.
How many people remember how Spotify... uhhh... "seeded" its music database at the start? (There's a hint in my question.)
https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/anti-copyright-extremists
https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...
And
https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-millio...
I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.
Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.
Its not just about Spotify, but the record labels and the artists themselves.
For a community that usually wants to allow artists control over their music, or better yet people control over their own information in general. It surprises me that people are now okay with music being scraped and freely put online.
I have a lot of respect for Glenn McDonald for spam fighting all these years on Spotify, but we can go better than PCA for mapping music these days. Any neural embedding model is going to produce more meaningful axes. In fact Spotify had an intern who did just that, just before the launch of Discover Weekly: Sander Dieleman. Along with Aäron van den Oord he was snapped up by Deepmind after their Spotify internship. Those two guys were (and are) wildly good at what they do.
Following Anna's logic, I was calling on Spotify to stop "investigating" archivists. Spotify could instead be engaging constructively here, with Anna's Archive, Internet Archive, or other groups.
How many people are actually going to download a torrent client, navigate through some massive torrent file collection to check the files of the artists they want to download so they can upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?
You just need a client that can make use of it.
I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in making one however, you can already get a patched Spotify APK from the usual mobile piracy spaces that's good enough.
The metadata is 200 GB which can be easily indexed and could be made searchable, then you download only what you need
I do that not because I don't want to pay Spotify, but because it is more convenient. I want all of my music in one place (VLC), and Spotify doesn't let me export my library as OPUS or Flac. Some stuff in my library is only posted on SoundCloud, some are old mp3 recordings by friends, and another 30% are only on YouTube (small cover artists)
The more interesting part is how this is your mental model of actually "physically" owning music.
The amount of messaging that will be needed to explain how home servers are convenient is pretty crazy.
As mentioned in other stories, this is really welcomed by other big corps or LLM related companies
It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences (for lack of non-marketing speak for self curated music)
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
It's very obvious that it's polluting and/or killing everything it touched so far though
Have you been to a contemporary art museum?
"Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy"
Funny thing, I've met a lot of independent artists who don't care about piracy one bit. I have a feeling it's the record labels and large corporations, not the artists, making the biggest fuss over piracy.
For large labels, exposure is a solved problem and album sales are all that matters.
They are all trying to maximize revenue, they just have different ways of going about it.
The only time I encountered this was after a power outage when my ISP's DHCP server handed me a new IP that was tainted. It felt like every major website was suddenly full of captchas.
Eventually I had to unplug the router for 24 hours until the ISP let go of my DHCP reservation. When I reconnected it gave me a new IP and the problems went away.
This is a archivalist institution that actively ignores "copyright" to further the art and science of our shared media legacy.
And frankly, public libraries would absolutely be deemed illegal if they were made 10 years ago. (And it was only because rich people like Rockefeller wanted to wash their actual history with a social-happy persona.)
Spotify (and netflix etc..) have become very hostile to exposing their catalogue over API, so i'm glad they've gotten open sourced :)
a true gift to humanity.
