What use is the metadata? Or is that stuff like the album covers etc?

I’m also a bit concerned about this:

Second, there’s an obsession with audiophile-grade quality (lossless FLAC, etc.) that inflates file sizes, making it impossible to maintain a complete archive of all music ever produced.

Does that mean that this spotify dump is a bunch of 64kbs mp3s, or worse some kind of lossy spotify transcode?