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Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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...

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