We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.
  • kindred@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    67·
    7 days ago

    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?

    • zingo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
    53·
    7 days ago

    I’ll strongly suggest to take out all the cheaply AI generated music from this “back up” and save themselves some space.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      I’m not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too

      • cheesybuddha@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        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

        • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          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.

    • nibbler@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      68·
      6 days ago

      do you have any numbers on the AI share? I doubt it’s more than a 2%, so I assume you are just virtue signalling on a completely unrelated topic here :-)

  • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      18·
      6 days ago

      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

      • Tangent5280@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        I hope (also assume since it hasn’t been taken down yet) it’s more of a decentralised deal with servers in many places and backups in every nation under the sun

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      7 days ago

      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…

  • lietuva@lemmy.worldEnglish
    39·
    6 days ago

    There’s definitely gonna be some crazy guy who will put this on their server and stream it to their phones lol

    • Gravitywell.xYz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      24·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
        13·
        6 days ago

        Yes, sure, but if those don’t get paid, artists don’t get paid. And artists are not forced to pick a label, they are free to go solo, but they still prefer labels, so it’s not that black and white labels bad, artists good

        • yessikg@fedia.io
          1·
          4 days ago

          You have no idea how hard it is to go solo, how the fuck would they get their songs out there? They would have to get really lucky on social media. How would they book concert venues? They would be stuck playing in shitty venues that pay peanuts.

          Anyways, artists make money off of music purchases, concerts, and merch

        • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
          5·
          6 days ago

          I’m not sure how you think Spotify compensation works, but it is not a “one stream and you get paid”-deal, but rather a revenue share model where artists are compensated from a large pool by total streams. The main share of your Spotify monthly subscription that goes to compensating artists goes to Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny etc. Being a top listener to your favorite, but underground band contributes negligibly to what they actually get paid.

          If you care about their compensation, buy the album as directly from them as possible, or buy merch/go to concerts, and recommend their msuic to other people so they might end up paying customers. Subscribing to Spotify and thinking they get a fair deal out of that is not the way, and increasingly not the way (with their GenAI-shenanigans).

          • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
            12·
            6 days ago

            First, what am I using is beyond the point and I’m not using Spotify because of their payment method and their politics. And again, if albums are on streaming services, they are voluntarily there, are they not?

            • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              6 days ago

              How voluntary is it when these platforms have a monopolistic grasp on how consumers access music these days? And the more people believe that the artists are actually fairly compensated from this model, the firmer this grasp becomes. What choice do they have of being there if they want to have any kind of reach?

              A Spotify Premium subscriptions will cost someone 156€ a year. If that person instead spent that entire music budget on purchasing albums from select musicians according to the enjoyment they derive from their works, or buy concert tickets or merch, and decides to pirate the rest of their music listening, what changes? For the consumer, they are now left with actual, irrevocable access (legal and illegal) to the same music you had rented access to before, and have spent the same amount of money. For the musicians, the ones who received the purchases are left with much more of your dedicated music spend, and the rest will have marginally less (their share based on total streams of your monthly subscription x12). For Spotify and Taylor Swift, they receive marginally less money (but more than the artists you actually listen to) of which they should probably not have received to begin with.

        • Gravitywell.xYz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          6 days ago

          Well if you genuinely care about seeing artists get paid the ones who need it most tend to make their conent available already for free on bandcamp or similar services, and have physical albums and merch you can buy.

          Last night i spent $10 on 3 albums on bandcamp, those artists each made more on that single purchase then they would from thousands of streams.

          Spotify making less (or more) money does not trickle down to artists on a per stream basis.

          Dont be a corporate bootlicker. Say it with me now, "If buying isnt owning Piracy is not stealing. "

          • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
            11·
            5 days ago

            It is really refreshing how this thread spins in “we know what’s best for the artists, certainly not paying for listening to their streams, that’s exactly what they want”. If you don’t want to use Spotify, that’s fine, I don’t want to either because they are an awful company. But that doesn’t make you the person who create the rules for artists nor does it give you the permission to listen to illegal content.

            • Gravitywell.xYz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              5 days ago

              I dont think its a huge leap to think artists would rather you be able to buy their music once and make a $ instead of stream it from a sevice that pays them next to nothing.

              • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                5 days ago

                What is stopping them? But it seems that general consensus here is that artists would like you to listen for free and here and there buy something from them.