Activists Downloaded Pretty Much All of Spotify

"Hacktivists with the group Anna's Archive - a search engine for shadow libraries, which are unauthorized collections of digital content - say they've found a way to download virtually the entirety of Spotify for preservation. In a blog post detailing their work, the archivists say they've archived the audio of some 86 million songs so far, representing 99.6 percent of total listens on the streaming service."

"They scraped metadata from nearly the entire Spotify library, however, which is some 300 terabytes in size, spanning 256 million tracks. There are 15.43 million artists represented, and 58.6 million albums. According to the blog post, it constitutes the "largest publicly available music metadata database" to date, and is the first step toward building a "preservation archive" for music."

"For example, the data on song popularity leads to the absolutely wild revelation that the top three songs on Spotify have a higher number of streams than the bottom "20-100 million songs combined," the hacktivists write. Interestingly, this leads to the question of how much of the Spotify library is made up of AI generated slop, an issue that human artists say is crowding them out of the platform. As the team writes, "we expect this number [of listens] to be higher if you filter to only human-created songs.""

Anna's Archive archived audio for approximately 86 million songs, representing 99.6 percent of total Spotify listens, and scraped metadata spanning about 300 terabytes and 256 million tracks. The dataset includes 15.43 million artists and 58.6 million albums and constitutes the largest publicly available music metadata database to date, intended as a preservation archive. Metadata analysis reveals extreme concentration of listens, with the top three songs outstreaming tens of millions of less-played tracks combined. The collection raises concerns about AI-generated content displacing human artists and gaps in preservation focused on commercial, high-quality files.

Read at Futurism