cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/7719730
cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/7719728
Here it is: https://annas-archive.org/blog/backing-up-spotify.html
Download all existing literature to build a library for preservation and you’re called a pirate. Download all existing literature from aforementioned library to train an LLM and you’re a tech innovator. What a strange world we live in.
If we’re pirates then they’re privateers, and I know which I respect less.
want the link just so i can know how to avoid it i’m a good girl who does’t steal totally.
You forgot to administer head pats
This is a good thing honestly, fuck Spotify it ruined music as much as any single company/service could.
Not as much as Ticketmaster. I would love to be able to see shows, but I’d soon chew my tongue off than buy their nonsense, and fuck their affiliates too. When people stop buying this shit we can solve the problem.
As an artist I’m very happy to see my work archived in there. Any suggestions where I can submit my music directly to archives.
You could provide a torrent of it directly.
Ngl, it pisses me off that number 4 on the Top 10,000 list is “Clean Baby Sleep White Noise (Loopable)”
If it makes you feel any better noise is hard to compress so it costs Spotify more I imagine
How long can whitenoise go before it repeats? Or vice versa, how short?
If it’s only 5seconds it can be played alot…
Most people still don’t know that their phones most likely already has a noise generator build in without any extra app (at least on iOS)
Which app is that? (I have an iPhone)
It’s in the accessibility settings. You can just search your phone for Background Sounds.
You can then also add it as a button to control center. Or create a shortcut if you want to have it on your Lockscreen or Home Screen.
Neat! Thanks!
Sadly there will be no King Gizzard in this archive.
Same for GY!BE, I guess
I bought all of their albums on Bandcamp for $1 when they had a deal going.That was to good to pass up.
Also got a couple albums on vinyl 🤟
Feels good to have sent some money they way after they dared to ditch Spotift 🙏
I’m not sure about that. They only recently removed their music from Spotify and this archive certainly took a good while to create.
However, these existing efforts have some major issues:
Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
Later…
We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
I must be kinda stupid, but it sounds to me like there’s some double speak. “Only popular music gets preserved, so we preserved music by popularity”
It’d probably be more beneficial to read the article directly from Anna’s Archive where they display plenty of graphs and infographics to make the data understandable. Unfortunately this article has none of that. The “over-focus on popular artists” is quite literally meaning they’re only missing artists who aren’t being listened to, most of which are probably AI anyway.
https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html
To be fair, the 10k is just a sample. The true amount is 86 million, about a quarter of all Spotify songs.
Put another way, for any random song a person listens to, there is a 99.6% likelihood that it is part of the archive. We expect this number to be higher if you filter to only human-created songs. Do remember though that the error bar on listens for popularity 0 is large.
For popularity=0, we ordered tracks by a secondary importance metric based on artist followers and album popularity, and fetched in descending order.
We have stopped here due to the long tail end with diminishing returns (700TB+ additional storage for minor benefit), as well as the bad quality of songs with popularity=0 (many AI generated, hard to filter).
Also it sounds like they had difficulty scraping some of the less popular songs and got them from somewhere else.
trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000’s of tracks each sounds horrible, Meta data and tracks and located in different areas. Audio is reencoded to OGG Opus.
For this to be useful for me I would have to spend about $6000 on hard drives (20/terabyte X 300 TB), than convert the files to MP3, and somehow rename the files to their original songs and artists and create appropriate directories.
Do not think this is practical.
Archival and practical use are different goals. This is not about making it easy to use as a music library
Or stop being an idiot and consider using self-hosted media solutions that handle the metadata for you. Like Plex, Jellyfin, or any of the roughly three dozen options here.
The right torrent client will also allow you to pick and choose which files to download, and you could even go a step further and add a new source provider to e.g. Lidarr that would handle these torrent files and pick out the music you want.
Result?
- no need to transcode to MP3 (not sure why you’d want to do that anyway when OPUS files can be played by practically any modern device)
- no need to manually do any namings
- no need to manually get metadata
- no need to get 300TB storage
Hell if you really wanted to, you could even vibe code a solution that includes a torrent client, these music torrents, and a web interface + API that provides all the necessary info for existing clients to be essentially used as a quasi Spotify alternative, only downloading music you actually listen to.
OPUS files can be played by practically any modern device
The radio of my car (bought in 2020) begs to differ.
Then you’re either transcoding when burning the CD or plugging in a modern player via aux, aren’t you?
I understand why people might not want a music library in FLAC, but just pre-transcoding everything to MP3 in 2025 just seems silly
Given you can buy a car made in the 1950s in 2020, that statement is worth about as much as the dump I just took
