Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library | Hacker News Reader

Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library

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54 points_vqpz82 comments

Previously: Backing up Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339 - Dec 2025 (634 comments)

I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives. Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.

They can't, their overlords would be very unhappy with it. Record industries are heavy in on DRM.

Are they really? Nearly every song is uploaded by it's creator to YouTube which has no DRM at all...

It's probably up to the publishers, not them.

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.

Simply sharing metadata, related artists, genres, etc would create a pretty interesting ecosystem[1].

[1]: https://everynoise.com/

Every Noise was created by a former Spotify employee.

He's a former Spotify employee now, but he was a Spotify employee when he made it. I think it hasn't been updated since he lost his data access.

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.

Not even in the “providing a way to get music” way?

A big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.

True, but feature parity isn’t required for competition. Plenty of subscribers will just be listening to what they know they want to listen to, and for them a giant DB of music is absolutely sufficient.

> I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.

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.

I doubt such a tool would be allowed in the major mobile app stores. The library of music isn't the product.

Stremio is on the App Store and can be used with a debrid service.

Fuck those licensing terms. They are the exact reason I cant make a Soundcloud notification bot for discord that is within the rules of the ToS. I sent them an email asking for an API key and basically got told no, license holders rule our world.

They're all for the rules, now.

How many people remember how Spotify... uhhh... "seeded" its music database at the start? (There's a hint in my question.)

also: "Musicians might note that 87% of tracks will now receive the same payment from Anna’s Archive as they do from Spotify: zero."

https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/anti-copyright-extremists

I really despise Spotify's payout algorithm too, since you mention it.

For the longest time I was a big Tidal fan. Still am. But I feel their financials show writing on the wall for their future. But one of the reasons for that appreciation on my part was that they 1) paid a lot more, per stream, to artists (sometimes, 8-10x more than Spotify's nominal purported royalties), and 2) they didn't have an algorithm for payout that heavily favored the 800lb artists in the room over the smaller, struggling acts.

Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.

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.

I don't think music producer would agree to that. Spotify would likely lose contracts even if they simply opted for silence.

Anna's archive offers to share their data for AI training (in exchange for donations), so that's certainly something the record labels want control of. https://annas-archive.org/llm

It's also probably something the artists themselves was control of as well

I am flabbergasted by the comments here, Spotify started with pirated music and now invests in the military.

https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...

And

https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-millio...

It is actually a good thing to invest in blowing up fascists, especially in the context of an ongoing land invasion.

If the fascists don't blow up the anti-fascists first.

An eye for an eye, leaves us all blind.

Yes, of course, because as we all know:

1. Appeasement was a big success.

2. Fascists are known for having balanced personalities that at some point have enough and don't want more.

@thenthenthen Spotify doesn’t, its founder who has now moved on is investing.

To me it is the “in any way” at the end. I can’t possibly understand the blind desire to distort reality by using mere words.

Maybe I was too hyperbolic, but when I read the original Anna's Archive announcement post, I appreciated their dedication to archiving content that may be lost one day. They called the effort "Backing up Spotify" and emphasized the good that opening the data could do. It's not about enabling piracy.

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.

I was looking for a song recently and can't find it. The artist was banned from YouTube and looks like they took their album off Spotify. An archive like this is good for preserving stuff from smaller artists like that

It is, should the artist agree to have their music put online for you to access for free

I don't know whether Spotify could agree to provide its entire library of music to an archive for Torrenting by anyone.

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.

Convenience won.

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?

A sufficiently seeded torrent is a high latency static CDN.

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.

Wasn't popcorn-time basically video streaming backed by torrent ? Why can't it be the same for audio ?

The metadata is 200 GB which can be easily indexed and could be made searchable, then you download only what you need

Now that's a cool idea.

And specifically, not everybody owns a NAS with 300 TB capacity. At 30TB drive for almost 1000€, we are talking about 10-15000€.

As mentioned in other stories, this is really welcomed by other big corps or LLM related companies

Most people won't listen to 10tb of unique tracks in their entire lives, let alone 30tb or 300tb... 1tb of music is about a full year of 24/7 unique tracks

Datahorder here, a 26tb drive is about $375, so I don't think your quote of 30tb drive prices make sense. You can get about 80tb for $1000

In Germany the 30TB Ironwolf NAS edition is quoted € 975 on Amazon. The 22TB is € 719

Great, so the copyright conglomerates have nothing to complain about if it's useless then.

That's unnecessarily worst case. No one is seriously using a usb cable to upload mp3s. There are plenty of paid and free spotify clones anyone can throw up.

> upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable

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.

> upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?

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)

Anti scraping measures are making it more difficult to use the web. I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.

> I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.

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.

Oooh, scary. "Investigations!"

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.)

I'm hoping that this metadata leak can revive projects like https://everynoise.com

Spotify (and netflix etc..) have become very hostile to exposing their catalogue over API, so i'm glad they've gotten open sourced :)

Probably a net positive for future open source music generation LLM models

Which means a net negative for humanity.

Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion

It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences (for lack of non-marketing speak for self curated music)

The camera did not kill painting. And how does comparing a camera to an LLM even make sense?

They're conflating the LLM to advancement by comparing LLM:Camera, when really cameras and paintings are two different things

Painting (portraits for example) as a profession largely disappeared, while art based on painting evolved (impressionism, cubism, etc) due to the camera.

My point is that photography is essentially a simulacra of reality, yet it unexpectedly created its own art form and influenced existing ones. So will the use of LLMs for generation

LLMs will not do what the camera did. LLMs have no anchor to reality like the camera, they simply optimize for the average. A camera is a whole new medium, an LLM is a statistical construction. Sorry to burst your AI bubble. LLMs will not be the new camera, they won't be a new programming language, and they won't be the new compiler.

I am not sure I agree, a camera on the surface of things is the most boring machine. It shows you what was already there. It is still can be the basis of several interesting art forms

I don't see why this can't happen with AI, or at least I am not certain like you it can't happen

It might turn out that there are more portrait artists, brush in hand, working today than at any point in history, in real numbers. This is certainly true for riding horses, and most definitly for musicians. But as the sole sources of those services, that is no longer true, or as percentages of total's, but with 9 billion people, the internet, and a big of effort, almost anything is viable.

I generally agree because the population grew, and music can be put aside has it never went through such a technological revolution (synth never really caught on)

But from what I saw there are less living horses today than 200 years ago, and although that just a proxy for horse riders I believe the same applies for painters, especially non-hobbyists

The camera did not kill painting. There are tons and tons of painters still, lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.

> lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.

Yes, because art evolves over time.

As it very likely will with generative art.

And even with that evolution, people still use paint, and people will still use instruments and make music the same ways we always have...

Arguably, the camera evolved painting because it expanded the idea of what it could be – that it could be more than the illustration of/"illusion" of reality.

I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.

Yes, which was the point I was trying to convey. However it did also kill the profession of painters (the craft in art vs craft). Which might unfortunately happen to the more commercial side of music

Do you have any evidence of all these "killings" of the profession or are you just vibing?

Photography had particularly dramatic effects on the livelihoods of painters who operated on the fringe of the mainstream. This included the portrait miniaturists, whose markets fell drastically, particularly after the introduction of the multi-pose and cheap cartes de visite in the mid-1850s. Many gave up, while others turned to colouring photos [25]. Some painters of sentimental genre scenes were also particularly affected, as a result of the profusion of readily available photographic genre works, often composed in a painterly or "pictorial" style [26]. This was sometimes due not to the public’s preference for the photographic version, but simply because a particular subject matter lost its appeal to painters and their clients once photography entered the scene [27]. In addition, the introduction of “half-tone” photography in the 1880s also initiated a slow decline in the market for newspaper and magazine illustrators [28].

Much more here: https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html

https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography

Nice wall of text, which part of that says painters jobs were killed?

Or did you just read the title of the second article and not realize it’s not being literal but capturing the anxiety of the painters in the 19th century?

I think the first article which is highly recommended (where the excerpt comes from) goes over subsequent effects on the profession. The second one goes over the different genres that disappeared, and concerns less with the artists themselves

Apart from that our interaction seem overly emotional for me so I'd leave it as that

So nothing about killing the profession, got it, so we were just vibing.

Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.

By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.

Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.

AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.

>Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion

Have you been to a contemporary art museum?

It killed realist art and it greatly reduced the "market" of available paintings, which back then was really a market, art was usually commissioned for the same reasons you take a photograph today

You could have just said "no" or maybe admitted that "killing" painting was overblown, or maybe that it was not an accurate descriptor at all if you're argument is that it just "changed" painting.

I don't do semantics arguments because they don't help anyone learn anything

It largely killed an industry which was everywhere, sure there are still paintings and it's a primer art form. The number of paintings commissioned and number of painters fell drastically since the 19th century to the point I am willing to guess you have never had your portrait taken, something that was common place in the equivalent pay grades of today tech workers. Regarding the art form it is also arguably less important in people's life then it used to be (while museums still exist), However most music today is still mostly a profession rather than pure art for the sake of art

We can continue discussing whether the word kill is a metaphor or must be used only for a zero or one situation but I don't think that's interesting enough compared to the actual topic

> It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences

It's very obvious that it's polluting and/or killing everything it touched so far though

it's an automatic bullshit machine so essentially it creates cliches as an automatic process

this doesn't mean this can't be controlled by someone talented

We should give everyone live grenades, someone talented might do something cool, maybe, eventually, who knows right ?

wasn't spotify started out as a collection of pirated songs? somethings go in full circle I guess.

And also being the successor to Napster, the irony is thick with this quote:

"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 an independent artist, exposure matters more than album sales as it leads to ticket sales.

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.

It's only "fairness" when Spotify does it.

long live anna's archive.

a true gift to humanity.

Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339

We'll add that to the toptext. Thanks!

I'm not sure why nobody else is seeing this, but this was a MASSIVE operations failure on Spotify. Any other company would've noticed an attacker downloading 86 million songs / 256m metadata. This is showing they cut corners. 2/3 their purpose as a streaming platform is to protect the digital content they licensed, and they failed miserably.

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