Backing Up Spotify
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The debate around backing up Spotify has sparked a heated discussion on copyright laws and the ethics of preserving digital music. While some commenters, like lelouch9099, questioned the legality of the endeavor, others, such as phainopepla2 and basisword, were quick to label it as outright illegal and a justification for "awful behavior." However, others pointed out the irony that Spotify itself got its start by using pirated mp3s, as nemomarx and venturecruelty noted, highlighting the complexities of the issue. The conversation also veered into criticisms of Spotify's business model and its treatment of artists, with jopicornell arguing that the platform pays artists mere cents, while true supporters of artists attend concerts and buy their music directly.
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People that gives money to artists are the ones going to concerts and buying music directly to artists. Spotify gives cents to artists, incetivizing awful behaviour (AI music, aggressive marketing, low effort art...).
A bunch of things:
1. You are all probably talking past each other - I expect the original question of legality was about criminal, and not civil, law.
2. I'm sure they did not view or sign the TOS to access this. You can't be bound to a contract you never view or intentionally assent to. At least in most countries/places.
For example, in the US I can show you tons of cases in just about every state and federal court where the court decided the TOS doesn't apply because it was never viewed or assented to.
IE cases like https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/nevada/nvdc...
(Ironically it works both ways, so if the contract provides you any guarantees, you can't take advantage of them to sue for breach if yuo never assented)
It's different if you can prove that they knew there was a TOS they would be bound by and just never bothered to look at the terms.
That is very hard to prove, and it does not suffice to prove that everybody has a TOS these days or whatever. You have to prove actual knowledge of a TOS by these particular defendants.
what would your ISP do?
A full year of these emails and nothing more than that ever happened.
(if you're wondering how I hit 8000 torrents, the answer is individual album torrents)
Unless they're international stars, not really. It's peanuts these days. https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/13djsl9/how_much_d...
Most people do not because they find it less convenient than paying 20bucks a month or whatever is the current price in 2025 but that doesn't change the reality.
It's not, theft involves taking something from someone, i.e. also depriving them of that thing.
This may be unauthorised copying aka piracy, but it's not theft.
What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.
Buy CDs. Use Bandcamp.
My spotify wrapped says I listened for 50,000 minutes this year. Assuming 2 minutes per song, that's 25,000 streams. I paid them $110, aka $0.004/stream. Assuming I'm a typical user, they obviously could not afford to pay any more than that per stream.
I googled "spotify pay per listen" and the first result is a reddit comment saying "The average payout on Spotify is only $0.004 per stream." The google AI overview says "Spotify [..] pays artists a fraction of a cent, typically $0.003 to $0.005 per stream". So I'll assume it's something in that ballpark.
So it seems like Spotify's payouts are completely reasonable, given their pricing. Is my logic wrong somewhere?
I’m paying for a family account (that’s around 250/year) and there are 5 people on it so my usage is 1/5th of that (50/year)
So that’s 0.0025€ per stream. I don’t think your assumption is unreasonable.
I'm pretty sure it's waaaay lower than that per 1000 streams.
Well, no. They'll just select the album download it selectively from the torrent.
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.
This doesn't apply to dematerialized content: the original copy still exists. The only negative impact occurs if someone decides to actually use the pirated copy in place of buying a licensed one.
The mere existence of this new pirate copy being around doesn't automatically imply that, especially if other, more convenient sources are available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
Spotify itself started with pirated music.
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.
It is technically not. Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not. You can’t steal a copyright (aside from something like breaking into your stuff and stealing the proof that you hold the copyright), and then a song is downloaded the original copyright holder still have copy.
Calling piracy theft was MPAA/RIAA propaganda. Now people say that piracy is theft without ever even questioning it, so it was quite successful.
What the music/movie industry was claiming in court was not theft. There is no statute that identifies piracy as theft. They were claiming copyright violation and wanted to collect damages for lost revenue.
You are bringing up “identity theft” which is also not theft. If you post your PII here and I use it to open a credit card in your name and then spend a bunch of the money using that card on buying goods and services, you are not the victim. What I do in that case is defraud the bank. They are the ones who are the actual victim and in the ideal world they would be the ones working with the authorities to get their money back.
Of course they would rather not do that so they invented a crime called identity theft and convinced everyone that it is ok for them to make you the victim. They make your life hell since they can’t find the actual criminal while you spend thousands of dollars trying to prove that you don’t owe thousands of dollars. But in reality you were not any part of the fraud. It is on the bank to secure their system enough to prevent this. But they have big time lawyer money and you don’t so here you are.
that seems like an overly narrow definition… what about identity theft, or IP theft?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/superseding-indictment-...
IP theft is more like espionage and possibly lost hypothetical revenue. Again, it isn’t larceny, burglary, etc. You still have the thing, it’s just that so does the perpetrator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
And if I stole something physical you had for sale, you wouldn’t make the money, so the end result is effectively the same.
What this really is exposing is that most art is not worth the same. A Taylor Swift album is not worth the same on the open market as a Joe Exotic album. Pricing both at say $20 is artificial. Realistically most music has near zero actual value, hence why if you are a B tier or lower artist you won’t make much compared to an A tier artist on platforms like Spotify or YouTube which pay per listen/watch.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but I find that nowadays the process of buying high-quality, DRM-free MP3 music is as simple and straightforward as it can be: you purchase the files (on Bandcamp, Amazon, Apple Music, etc.), download them legally, and then physically own them perpetually.
By the way, when purchasing through Bandcamp, 85% goes to the artist (https://bandcamp.com/fair_trade_music_policy). So not only do you own the music, but you also make sure that the artist is paid for their work.
Many artists already work this way. They are on Spotify et al. for reach not because it does anything meaningful for them financially. It’s not like your subscription fee is distributed fairly to the artists you listen to anyway[0].
To the extent they make money at all, it’s from touring, and selling physical media and merch.
The world under Spotify is about as financially bad for most artists as if everyone was pirating away.
If we all quit Spotify, pirated everything, and spent the money we saved buying things from the artists we were enjoying the most (from their own sites, Bandcamp, or at concerts), the artists and musicians would be much better off.
[0] Unless you only listen to the big stars who end up getting most of the payouts.
I think the negatives for artists are minimal while the benefits of preserving a annotated snapshot of contemporary music for future generations is very valuable.
> A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.
They wont and shouldn’t divulge the details, but I imagine that would be a fun read!
I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.
Sure, you can also use Tor. The people engaged in copyright-related illegality generally don't.
I certainly wouldn't attempt
https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/sp...
If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.
But I was referring specifically to all third-party reverse-engineered Spotify players requiring premium accounts to function at all.
(It is plausible they added some new DRM but it's not going to be anything too crazy)
Premium gets 320kbit/s (or lossless)
so either they found a way around that lock, but not the quality lock, or they just decided 160k is good enough (it generally is), and decided to stick with that for filesize & bandwidth savings
So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.
https://notice.cuii.info/
"Their buisness model is based on copyright infringement"
Well, where to complain that Anna's Archive ain't a buisness?
I recommend NextDNS or similar to bypass those DNS blocks and also block ads at a very deep level that works ok mobile and even inside apps.
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?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
They have a page on their site explicitly offering their services to AI companies, giving direct, high-speed access to their archives in exchange for significant donations (5 figures). AI may or may not be their primary motivation but they're definitely on board with it.
\s
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, 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.
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
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