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What use is the metadata? Or is that stuff like the album covers etc?
I’m also a bit concerned about this:
Second, there’s an obsession with audiophile-grade quality (lossless FLAC, etc.) that inflates file sizes, making it impossible to maintain a complete archive of all music ever produced.
Does that mean that this spotify dump is a bunch of 64kbs mp3s, or worse some kind of lossy spotify transcode?
Modern pop music is already compressed to hell, FLAC is a waste of bandwidth unless you’re encoding orchestral pieces.
Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that’s what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a ‘popularity’ of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.
Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).
Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
It’s not MP3, it’s Ogg vorbis
They’re encoding the top songs with higher resolution, the next bunch ( it’s still millions of songs) with about half that bitrate and not planning to save the next tranche which is like a looooot of songs but each has less than 1000 plays over the history of Spotify.
This is what I vaguely remember after reading the whole original post AND after a night drinking.
No nitpicking.
Spotify uses I think 192 or 320kbps Vorbis which is quite good and still has small sizes.
Even that’s 300 TB so I kinda understand. If this is all thar survives into the long term that’s ok I suppose
Here’s an archive link, in case anyone, like me, refuses to read anything on Substack due to their affinity for Nazis:
Simone reminds me of the class perspective: musicians here behave like atomized small owners, caught in their enterprecarity, who (legitimately) ask for some defense of their property rights, attacked both by hackers and by the big monopolists of platforms and AI. Because from these property rights, in this case IP, comes a rent, and from this rent, independent artists and label owners try to make a living. Again, right or wrong, this is what’s happening.
I remember reading somewhere that independent artists make basically no money from Spotify.
Is that still true, or have creators found a way to claw back value from the platform, and that’s why they’re defending it?
Spotify performs as one of the worst when it comes to creator royalties and appropriate pay.
It’s not THE worst, and these numbers have shifted since 2022. The general sentiment (that Spotify stiffs artists) is still shared by the general community.
This plot is complete BS, Deezer pays double than spotify.
And one of the highest payers, Qobuz, is missing
I’m always surprised that Deezer is still around. Who on earth is still using it?
Also, fuck iHeartRadio. Not for their royalties, but for buying up tons of local stations and stripping them of anything that made them even remotely worth listening to. Fuckers bought the only station in town that played any amounts of metal and turned it into yet another top 10s station
I liked Deezer until it’s redesign a few years ago. Now the design language is so ugly I could never consider paying for it. Their biggest flaw for me though is that some albums are just randomly not available in lossless and the only alternative is mp3 which I refuse to use in 2025. Some lossy codecs are great so why do Deezer and Qobuz still mess around with mp3?
I use Deezer. After Spotify started subsidizing Rogan, it was the only service that had a reasonably Spotify-like UI. Apple Music was absolutely horrible, especially for someone who already has a local library.
I used Deezer up until last month, seemed fine to me
This graph is weird. Soundcloud looks like it pays more according to it, but it needs to swap positions with Spotify.
What’s up with soundlcouds position in that chart?
I think the point is more general about profiting from “renting” their music rather than from their labor. The fact that Spotify gives them peanuts make their position even more miserable.
who (legitimately) ask for some defense of their property rights, attacked both by hackers and by the big monopolists of platforms and AI
This does not sound like they’re defending Spotify.
