I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
> Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff.
The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
They have a page on their site explicitly offering AI companies direct, high-speed access to their archives in exchange for 5 figure sums of money. AI may or may not be their primary motivation but they're clearly on board with it.
\s
There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?
Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/
While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.
Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.
My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)
Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
or they are totally immune to deanon / getting tracked down,
or they are stupid enough to allow their greed to become their downfall,
or this legend about underground warriors of light fighting against evil copyrighters is utter bullshit.
Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect.
And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices.
The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection
Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-...
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Until they decide to silence the artist you want to listen to because emperor god trump decides to unperson them.
Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
>I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience
Spotify isn't "convenient" if you want to control and understand the media and software in your life. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/spotify
Thankfully Spotify isn't primarily a U.S company.
Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.
What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.
How much media that the average person choses to consume is this 'free use' media? How much is media that artists chose to make money from?
By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.
I challenge you to ask 10 creative people in your life if they would stop doing whatever it is they do if they had a billion dollars.
No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?
That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/
For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/
This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then.
Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain.
And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.
Do they have DRM at all? Youtube and Pandora don't.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g (same thing, but on an official channel instead)
The 256 kbps format for music will be protected by DRM. If you do not have DRM available youtube will fallback to a lower quality format to play the auduo.
Their native clients use a weak hand-rolled DRM scheme (which is where the ogg vorbis files come from), whereas the web player uses Widevine with AAC.
It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...
We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing.
If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.
An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.
In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.
Didn't Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They're too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.
I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement.
First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt.
Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
Challenge accepted…
This is probably how they did it, over time, was use a few thousand accounts and queued up all the things, and download everything over the course of a year.
The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.
After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean all of that out.
IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.
Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.
The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.
Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.
They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.
Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?
Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.
And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.
Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.
As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.
Content creation as a career is probably dead.
No, you literally can't.
(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)
(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments.
Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify.
If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch.
I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about.
Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
people defend convenience way too much. spotify isn't good for us and spotify-like-streaming is destroying the music industry.
most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.
most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em.
Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars.
youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money.
now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.
I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control.
Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture.
Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream.
That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams.
I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly.
also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists.
piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.
Youtube also paid out literally 50x more to creators in 2024 than Patreon had total subscriptions on the platform.
These big platform payouts matter a lot.
Unless you're a small potato. Approximately 0% of what I pay for spotify goes to the artists I actually listen to. Fucking Taylor Swift and the Beatles estate don't need my money.
You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.
Assume an artist (either directly or through a rights holder) makes 1/3 income from streaming, 1/3 from merch and physical albums, and 1/3 from live events.
40m streams per year would be 800k per week. 200k fans worldwide playing 4 times per week on average could get you there. Thats like a decent sized but not enormous youtube channel.
200k fans worldwide would also support the ticket sales and merchandise sales aspects.
I believe Weird Al posted his streaming revenue a few years ago. He had something like 80 million streams and said he earned about $12. https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/weird-al-yankovic-wrappe...
There is a reason people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly, it's how they make money. Weird Al is known for his amazing live shows, there's a reason for it: they make more money.
"$2 or more per thousand streams, split across rightsholders" seems like an accurate estimate.
Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).
What are the rough rates for each pool? That's the important part here. And how many artists are far enough from the average ratio that the detail of two pools matters.
https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/ This site says $0.00238 is typical for "worldwide" and a lot more than that for US and Europe specifically.
But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India.
Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.
CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices.
We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already.
Anything that gives different value to different artists is probably going to favor the big ones and just make things worse.
The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.
Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.
Maybe not the best comparison to anything. Swift is known for being an even better busiensswoman than artist and obsessed with having control.
She screwed her record company for profits, not the other way around. Not many people have done that. She's likely making money on both ends of the stick.
edit: I looked it up, 70% of spotify's payouts go directly to labels, not artists. So...that $10 bil is nothing.
This is by design and it's the same broken system that metallica defended in the 90s/00s because it benefits large artists while fucking over the other 99%.
We keep repeating the same script using the same busted short term logic.
They make a living; not a luxurious one, but they do OK. They just enjoy making music, and feel that it's worth it. Many of them never even record their music.
there's also the invaluable aspect of networking that touring allows. bit of a tangent, but it's very important for musicians to network.
The exception are musicians who do production stuff. Think movie/tv scores, commercials, etc. I actually know a handful of artists who used to tour quite a lot but eventually settled down to do production stuff. So they transitioned from touring to make money to production. Touring all year with no healthcare catches up to people.
I can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.
it's an archive to defend against Spotify going away. Remember when Netflix had everything, and then that eroded and now you can only rely on stuff that Netflix produced itself?
the average consumer will flock when Spotify ultimately enshitifies
Has nothing to do with perceived enshittification by Netflix (even though they have enshittification too).
Spotify is under the same threat: they have no content that they own. Everything is licensed.
They want to own something but it's always going to be a drop in the ocean. They have a small new music label thing called RADAR but I imagine the failure rate on that is very high. They need to buy a label if they want to meaningfully change this. Just like Amazon now owns MGM and Netflix maybe getting Warner Bros. Presumably they can't afford to do this, and I don't think that integration would work as well in the music industry.
Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.
> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
There is. And most people would not even recognize a lot of AI music without multiple listens and digging through things like "is there any online presence (which can also be easily spoofed)".
I've fallen into the trap myself with some (pretty generic) blues music
Are they?
And that's before we ask the question of how to identify AI-generated music (no one asks that question, but everyone wants it removed).
[0]: https://simkl.com/5743957/list/59981/cancelled-tv-shows-netf...
Largest example: a lot of Russian music is not available on Spotify because of the Russia-Ukrane war, and Spotify pulling out of Russia. So they don't have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.
This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)
I hope readers will feel our frustration.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
What's stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker?
Slow, but effective.
I wouldn't call this very effective. It would take an impractically long amount of time to capture a meaningful fraction of the collection and quality would suffer greatly.
Bought a spotify card with cash, email was registered on public wifi.
Who cares? :-)
I grew up on sites like Suprnova, and quickly found I could not discern the difference between 320 mp3s and lossless.
Even now, I only seem to notice if I use a very high end pair of headphones, and mostly with electronic music that has a lot of soft parts with sounds that are in the low or high end of the spectrum.
But yes, it is inconvenient and slow.
Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?
Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that Google controls this.)
For them, 300TB is just cheap
More serious response: research is explicitly included in fair use protections in US copyright law. News organizations regularly use leaked / stolen copyrighted material in investigative journalism.
Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?
As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.
Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10/month subscription?
Curious why not? Assuming you only used the metadata. I think they would be considered raw facts and not copyrightable.
I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. Or if the major record labels already license their entire catalogs for training purposes cheaply enough, so this really is just solely intended as a preservation effort?