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> 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.

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.

The first users of this dataset will be Big Tech corps. Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple will all be happy to use this dataset for training their LLMs.

For them, 300TB is just cheap

The metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably

> this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners

I can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.

>The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumer

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

>I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.

What's stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker?

Slow, but effective.

This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.

> 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.

Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?

I dunno if they publish like a 10 TB torrent of the most popular music I can see people making their own music services. A 10 TB hard disk is easily affordable, and that's about 3 million songs which is way more than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, even if you reduce that by 100x to account for taste.

It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...

Just cite facebook getting busted training its AI on torrents proven to contain unlicensed material lol

DRM aside, Spotify clearly should have logic that throttles your account based on requests (only so many minutes in a day..), making it entirely impractical to download the entirety of it unless you have millions of accounts.

> I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.

Do they have DRM at all? Youtube and Pandora don't.

Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?

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.

Just like with anything digital you (and Spotify) are fully at the mercy of the rights holders. When (not if) they pull their stuff, or replace their stuff, or change their stuff, you can never get the original back unless you preserve it.

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.

>> 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...?

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.

Id be stunned if we didn't find out Anna's Archive is a front for a handful of shadier VCs who are into AI. Even if AA themselves don't know it and just take the cash.

> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners

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.)

I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.

Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.

True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.

You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore

That being sad, I have a lot of non-mainstream tracks in my playlists on YouTube Music that have YouTube comments along the line of “I wish this was available on Spotify :’(“. I bet the same goes for What.CD.

So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.

Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.

Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.

Yeah this is actually quite nefarious, as it is a private organization that decides what sites get blocked, with no legal oversight.

- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearingstelle_Urheberrecht_im...

- https://netzpolitik.org/2024/cuii-liste-diese-websites-sperr...

Its a DNS based block, so overriding your default DNS server is enough to circumvent it. I think Dns over Https also works.

In that vein, I am trying to find out why searching for

    alextud popcorntime

They even find a fork of that particular repo, which in turn links back to it, but refuse to show the result I want. Have't found any DMCA notices. What is going on?

Was also shocked to see that (Berlin, Telekom here).

"at scale" could mean they had direct access to a server or to storage, maybe because they had an insider giving them access, or they found secrets that had leaked somewhere?

It is not hard. But please don't misuse it and ruin the fun for everyone. It is nice to be able to use the music relatively easily for hobby projects. My music server has functionality to play tracks from Spotify this way:

https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/sp...

How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.

they're probably just using something like https://github.com/nor-dee/spotizerr-spotify

spotify used to do just that (stream p2p) until 2014 or so

https://www.scribd.com/document/56651812/kreitz-spotify-kth1...

I recently got into the whole homelab *arr stack for things like movies and tv and while I know options exist for music I just don’t see the need yet price-wise. Spotify is still just cheap enough for me to not care enough. We’ll see how long this holds.

That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.

I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.

Yeah we shouldn’t. But we may.

a la "Popcorn Time."

"and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution"

They are based in russia. And they currently do not work together so well with the west.

So it is imaginable, that if some people give Trump quite some money, to make Annas takedown part of some deal to lift sanctions after a ceasefire in Ukraine, but .. it does not seem like it. I rather suspect more effort in the west to block access to unwanted sites like this. My ISP in germany is already blocking it.

I've heard 2:00 is some kinda sweet spot for the Spotify algorithm and payouts? You get paid per play so you don't want to it too long, but if your track is much shorter than two minutes you get penalized or something. I know they've had to remove ambient tracks that were cut into 40 second clips as part of this.

So you might see a lot of anchoring just like YouTube videos kept stretching to almost exactly ten minutes?

This already exists and is interesting to play around with - https://github.com/ASLP-lab/DiffRhythm

The metadata is gold, but I was immediately curious why why wouldnt go for Tidal first. Though what ever they have on Spotify I think is unique.

Yeah, in the article they write:

The data will be released in different stages on our Torrents page:

[X] Metadata (Dec 2025)

[ ] Music files (releasing in order of popularity)

[ ] Additional file metadata (torrent paths and checksums)

[ ] Album art

[ ] .zstdpatch files (to reconstruct original files before we added embedded metadata)

Probably not down, but blocked by your ISP. Try a VPN. Same thing happens here.

Ironic. But its working for me.

Both C#m and Db can be played on piano using only the black keys (skipping the 3rd note of the scale). This makes them easy keys for beginners. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but it could be related.

Anecdotally, I know a few vocalists that sound great in these keys and use them as a starting point

Electronic dance music is the biggest genre in the data. So then easy to play shouldn't matter. It's still an interesting question. I think playing Db is pretty nice on the piano even if it's not the easiest.

Difficult to play in what instrument?

YouTube Music works pretty well for me. One great feature is that it includes not just a commercial music streaming catalog, but all user uploads of music on YouTube.

Why haven't you unsubscribed then?

I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I'm still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it's specific to genres, but I haven't encountered any generated junk tracks.

This is more frequent than you would assume. I’ve neither subscribed to Apple Music nor Spotify for this exact reason: I’m a millenial who would like to discover music.

Another extremely annoying effect is, being 40+, they only suggest music for my age. In “New” and “Trending”, I see Muse and Coldplay! I should make myself a fake ID just to discover new music, but that gets creepy very fast.

BitTorrent protocol doesn’t force you to download all of the files of a torrent :)

Now imagine a dedicated music client that will download and stream (and share, because we are polite) only the needed files :)

You can download torrents selectively. I think if they adopted that cautious attitude they wouldn't exist in the first place

Anna's archive mirrors z-lib and libgen, so those are the main alternatives. But it's unlikely anna's archive would go down so easily, they take a lot of precautions.

think popcorn time for mp3s/flac instead of mp4.

a client can selectively list and then stream individual files from a huge torrent. if you've ever watched illegal movies/shows on those random domain websites, you're likely streaming it from a torrent on the backend somewhere.

it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see some docker images pop up in a few days to do exactly this as a sort of "quasi-self-hosted jellyfin". Where a person host a thin client on a machine that then fetches the data from the torrent, then allows the user to "select" their library. A user can just select "Top hits from the 80s" and it'll grab those files from the torrent, then stream or back them up.

I don't really see why it wouldn't, from an end user perspective, be any different than a self hosted jellyfin or plexamp.

I am in no way saying that this is cheap but 300 TB will set you back a little less than $6k with tax. Very attainable for people other than OpenAI and Facebook. And it's not crazy at all to snag a server with enough bays to house all those.

This works nicely: https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader

This is where ChatGPT shines. Just ask it to write you a script, it'll give you all the instructions.

I've used ChatGPT to write a whole bunch of playlist logic scripts (e.g. create a playlist that takes tracks from playlists A, B and C, but exclude tracks in playlist D.)

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

I bet you can whip up a super simple script with an LLM to do this!

It would be interesting to find out how that has changed with the growth of the music industry over the years. I suspect that many of these <1000 streamed could be artificially generated for monetary purposes but I'm not entirely sure. That being said, there is a lot of good music with less than 1000 streams. I've been looking myslef and I've definitely found some hidden gems.

Interesting if that is considered to be copyrightable. Any white noise track is perceptually indistinguishable from another, but none have the exact same sequence of samples except by chance, or if the noise generator happens to be deterministic as a function of time.

I find it so odd that people then to streaming services for stuff like this. I have a dedicated white noise machine, and when I travel, I use the white noise (bright noise actually) built into the iPhone.

Relying on an external hosted service would never cross my mind, and surely wouldn’t be something I go to on a daily basis.

Not legal. This group does not concern themselves with copyright law.

Adherence to the legal framework is a function of your risk appetite.

Currently it says they have released metadata and album art. Is archiving and sharing the textual track metadata alone (no images, no audio) legal in the US, or Europe? By what basis is it legal or illegal?

Very, if we delete copyright like we're supposed to.

Not legal

Completely illegal.

It's not. It's awful people justifying awful behaviour. And it's why we can't have nice things. There are always assholes ready to exploit others.

Former classical singer here. Only theory I can come up with is that opera tends to have large casts where all the singers are credited individually which would inflate the absolute numbers of "artists" relative to other generes. I still struggle to imagine this accounting for bringing such a niche genera to the top here.

> Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists?

My guess is just the same opera performed by a ton of different orchestras, and perhaps the same orchestra for different recordings, times however many operas there are.

All torrent clients must necessarily support partial downloads because of the nature of torrents. The files are split into pieces which are downloaded and then assembled by the torrent client.

Wasn't all data available to users though?

I mean... not really? Not much music is Spotify exclusive (at least from the 99.6% of what people listen to mentioned in the article), and from friends in the industry I can guarantee you all major content platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a large chunk of YouTube) have already been completely copied without a business agreement with the rightsholders by AI startups and big-name players.

> and a way to download that without my ISP doing something about it.

what would your ISP do?

Why... does Putin like music more than the next guy?

The people I know who go through the trouble of pirating and downloading vast libraries of music are all musicians themselves, or at the very least total music nerds. They don’t want to lose access to their stuff, plus if they ever need to import audio into a DAW, DRM is a no-go. They are the same people who spend large amounts of money on vinyls, and support smaller independent artists through concerts, merch and (back in the day) CDs.

It used to be more mixed, but today, piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.

Music piracy is already a thing, not to mention you don't even need to torrent nowadays when music is available for free on YouTube. Those who don't want to pay already don't pay so nothing changes there.

The value of Spotify is the convenience, and this collection does not change that in any way. Your argument would apply if someone were to make a Spotify clone with the same UX using this data.

Stealing is not the correct word.

Don't worry, they let Spotify keep the original files.

Spotify can shut down any day. Even if it survives, it's removing content all the time. How are future generations supposed to study and listen to music if it is lost? Imho, someone has to do it.

Nobody is gonna download a 300TB torrent just to get the latest Taylor Swift album. There are much easier avenues than that.

What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.

Buy CDs. Use Bandcamp.

Why is this stealing? You can already listen to everything that's on Spotify with a free account. You are free to also record the audio while it's playing. I suppose grabbing the actual file should't matter? Or is this about releasing? And robbing people of plays they would otherwise get through Spotify?

Spotify used pirated songs initially when they started it. So...

Hey, you should look up how Spotify got started. :)

While I wouldn't call this scummy I do agree with your sentiment. It is technically stealing and those copyrights should be respected.

Full disclosure, I am a career musician AND have been known to pirate material. That said, I think this is a valuable archive to build. There are a lot of recordings that will not endure without some kind of archiving. So while it's not a perfect solution, I do think it has an important role to play in preservation for future generations.

Perhaps it's best to have a light barrier to entry. Something like "Yes, you can listen to these records, but it should be in the spirit of requesting the material for review, and not just as a no-pay alternative to listening on Spotify." Give it just enough friction where people would rather pay the $12/month to use a streaming service.

Also, it's not like streaming services are a lucrative source of income for most artists. I expect the small amount of revenue lost to listeners of Anna's Archive are just (fractions of) a penny in the bucket of any income that a serious artist would stand to make.

Ageee with you, this release is obviously a scummy thing to do.

Same as if someone released every book on Kindle for free. There are rules. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.

Not to mention the organization is openly trying to profit from this data by selling it to big tech orgs for AI training! None of the artists consented to that, I am sure, to say nothing if Spotify's interests.

On top of that they beg for donations.

First we need good stem splitting

I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?

do you mean that researchers should be disallowed from accessing art?

I do not see how research interferes with all the benefits you prioritise. Can't you continue to enjoy those benefits?

Many people think 'real' music has electric guitars. I think they're wrong, but why argue with them? I think it's fine if you do not like music made from music, but that ship sailed last century. One detail you may be missing is that there are imperfect messy individual artistic humans who make music from music too. Computers are no more an obstacle to human connection through music than electric guitars are.