Well, they have to say "we're training a music AI" while slipping several million dollars into the pockets of the right people. Rich people don't win legal battles by actually proving what they did isn't illegal, they do it by discreetly paying people to say they did.

And slip the POTUS a gold phone or a couple thousand bucks and you are g2g

I fucking love annas archive.

Anna does seem rather insane though

Edit: I was thinking of Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub

Mashup artist detected

Both. Per the SQL schema printed in the article, table track_audio_features has both fields tempo and key along with many other technicals. Worth checking out, it's near the bottom of the page.

BPM yes, keys I'm not so sure.

Yes, and it hasn’t been easy to dig up until recently. There were a few ways to search the “hidden” metadata fields that Spotify uses internally. But it definitely hasn’t been easy or straightforward.

Those hidden fields are how Spotify recommends similar artists. You have a few bands on repeat with specific instruments, chord progressions, and singer vocal range? Gee, maybe you’ll enjoy other bands that are similar to that…

It says,

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)

Would be amazing if it was. I would love to just have Spotify's music on my nas

The article claims that they are:

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files).

They've released torrents of the metadata, and they plan to release the music files, but they haven't yet. They intend to start by offering the downloads as bulk torrents, but they're open to considering implementing the ability to download single songs in the future.

So in short, yes, but you can't download them yet

Not yet, but that’s the end goal. The tricky part is that they’re only offering bulk downloads for now, which means downloading a single artist or album would be difficult/impossible. You’d need to download the entire compressed file of like 300GB of music, then extract the specific songs/artists/albums you wanted. The goal for now is preservation, meaning they want to make the bulk download as easy as possible, to make sure people can preserve it. Once they’ve got that in a pretty good spot, they may look into allowing more granular downloads.

It's probably blocked by your particular ISP, not every German ISP.

Record labels themselves would march on foot to burn down the archives

Maybe they could say they're AI. Apparently copyright infringement's legal then.

Yeah they're definitely gonna catch some legal action for this, even tho I'm all for them releasing the data

They said this in the linked blog post:

A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.

Seems like reason enough to choose to scrape Spotify to me.

Spotify has lossless now. Although if you're listening on anything with Bluetooth then you probably won't notice anyway.

Spotify claims to offer lossless quality on much of their catalog; is this claim false or is there something more I'm missing here?

They were trying to keep file sizes down.

No one can tell the difference beyond 320kbps

Honestly, this is the best time to snapshot it, because even with the slop already there, the exponential increase that's about to happen will absolutely dwarf what's there now.

Step 1: Buy £6,000 worth of identical hard drives and a motherboard with 16 SATA ports. Or £12,000 worth and a RAID 1 server rig. Or £24,000 and RAID 6