This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Does this mean the MusicBrainz database will soon go from 5 million to 186 million tracks?
Asking the real questions here...
Probably not worth it to store the AI tracks
That's exactly what I was wondering too.
Acquiring high quality music is already easy enough in most cases.
What I am interested in is the metadata. Accurate tagging of all my files is of high interest.
If I ran mb, I would be cautious importing the data directly. I'm sure Spotify would consider it trade information and go after anyone directly using it. However if a few million people added the tracks with individual edits then it probably won't take too long.
I'll strongly suggest to take out all the cheaply AI generated music from this "back up" and save themselves some space.
I'm not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too
You could cut off your search around the time AI tracks started to appear. Not sure when that was, maybe 2023. You'd miss a lot of recent stuff, but you'd filter out a lot of spam too
I see your point, but as you say, there would still be the tradeoff of missing more recent stuff. That might only involve missing a couple of years' worth of stuff now, but AI isn't going away any time soon, so it would mean that there'd be an increasing amount of human made music not being archived; One of the things I like about Anna's archive is that they seem to look at this problem as a long term, informational infrastructure kind of way, so I imagine they wouldn't be keen on stopping the archive at 2023.
It seems they've opted for a different tradeoff instead: lower popularity songs are archived at a lower bitrate, and even the higher popularity stuff has some compression. Some archives go for quality, and thus prioritise high quality FLACs, so Anna's archive are aiming to fulfill a different niche. I can respect that.
The data they compiled is really cool.
If reading the chart right, the genera with the most artists is opera.
Even if they didn't have the music files, the analysis on the metadata is insane.
Publicly admitting they are the origin of the torrents is definitely ~~a risky~~ an insane move. I don't think they want Sony going after them, but also fuck Sony for locking art behind shitty contracts that forces these kind of projects to exist.
Publicly admitting they are the origin of the torrents is definitely a risky an insane move. I don’t think they want Sony going after them
Let's be honest: Everybody is trying to go after Annas Archive. Every book publisher wants to get them, the US government, too and it really doesn't matter if every music publisher wants them also. I hope that they are based in a country where the western systems can't get them
Yeah, it's a wild move admitting that they are the source of pirated content for music here.
We don't need Anna's Archive to go under as a result of Sony going after them because of this....
They have had a dozen or more lawsuits/police actions against them. They are already enemy #1 in piracy terms, so I expect they are okay leaning into it and doing more good for the world.
The 3 major labels are equally predatory not only Sony
There's definitely gonna be some crazy guy who will put this on their server and stream it to their phones lol
- 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.
- 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).
- For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
- For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.
Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn't the focus be on getting the least popular music first?
It depends on what your goal is: If you want to preserve the music that is important to most people or to the era, you should start with the most popular stuff. And Spotify has a big spam problem. Everybody who thinks he is a DJ wants his music to be on there and there is so much AI music flooding the scene. So it does make sense to backup what people are actually listening and not some AI-generated music spam nobody cares about.
I mean, they say earlier that music is actually well-preserved, but it's disproportionately popular music. If the goal is then to preserve everything, I'd expect them to go for stuff that isn't likely to be in some random audiophile's collection or whatever then.
Unfortunately if you sort by least popular musicon Spotify, you’ll get nothing but spam
The politics of preservation is definitely an interesting one. I suppose one argument in favor of preserving more popular music is that there are going to be fewer popular tracks than unpopular tracks - and they're already at 300TB, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it's a third the size of their existing library of ebooks.
If we were talking about the ethnic music of an extinct tribe that uses a language on risk of disappearing, sure, you would be right.
But think about it for a bit longer. They are just a commercial production that had no cultural impact in a population. They are still getting preserved in a format with a quality degradation that is imperceptible to the human ear. That's usually enough. Audiophiles are usually overzealous about fidelity preservation. But the efforts are often misguided and discussions abound on technical topics that ultimately don't matter.
I agree. I seed torrents/files that took me a long time to finish.
If you want that long tail, bandcamp and soundcloud are better sources. The barrier to entry is low with those, and there's a plethora of small, niche artists just doing their own thing.
For a representative snapshot of music though, it's pretty amazing. It shows what a massive percentage of the planet listens to, preserved hopefully across many seeds, and historians will love shit like this in the future.
This is the one thing on Spotify I can’t get elsewhere. Would be nice to have a non transcode copy.
https://open.spotify.com/album/4emoC6C9fCDkWPdTuxN9an
…Like Cologne (Spotify Exclusive)
Queens of the Stone Age
2013 • 3 songs • 14 min 5 sec
Well, since this archive says it contains the original ogg @160kbps for all artists with a popularity >0, it'll be in this collection. Your wait may be over soon.
Spotify is why I set up a Funkwhale server
Is funkwhale also a sort of soulseek?
AFAIK: Yes. But it's supposedly a pain to set up, so I'll never know the difference.
TBH I plan to migrate off Funkwhale to something more featureful and yea it was a bit of complex set up. Props to the devs tho, it's open source, stable, and does what it says on the tin
No. Soulseek is old school P2P. All you need to do is run the client software, set a local shared folder, and your are client and server in one. Funkwhale is more like running your own Lemmy instance and building a community. The difference between them is like the difference between using Airdrop or Syncthing to share files and hosting hosting your own domain and server.
I guess I gotta donate more to anna
Damn, boy! That's a big ass music collection.
Dont have the space but love to see this. I hope people seed this for a long time
Oo, I'll have to check those when they release. I follow some artists that only upload to YouTube and Spotify, neither of which is ideal.
So the artists get paid even less than from Spotify?
Its mostly Sony, UMG, and all the other leeches who would get paid less for their share holders.
I dont feel like editing the image but imagine the guy with most of the cookies in this picture was UMG and the artists are the guy on the right.
a few years ago, back when I was still using Spotify, I checked my Wrapped and apparently I was using Spotify more than 99.5% of users in my country, and when it came to my most listened artist, I was in top 0.05% listeners worldwide. doing some back-of-the-napkin math with the data I got online about Spotify's payouts, it turned out the money the artist got during that year from me amounted to ~~less than~~ just a bit over a dollar.
if you're really concerned about supporting artists, use the money you'd pay for your music streaming subscription and buy their album or a piece of merch every two months.
Yeah, I've been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say "steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch".
I've also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.
An unexpected side effect of this is that because I'm aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery
I'm guessing this is more about preserving culture and art. I find it unlikely that this post would be someone's first clue that they could listen to music for free, and listening to music out of this dump would be way harder than any other method.
Who's fault is it that there's no fair systems one could use (except maybe bandcamp)? Not mine at least, I don't use Spotify at all. I would not sell my music there if I would be an artist.
