Posted by ikamm 2 days ago
Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.
> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.
I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.
How many people remember how Spotify... uhhh... "seeded" its music database at the start? (There's a hint in my question.)
https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/anti-copyright-extremists
For the longest time I was a big Tidal fan. Still am. But I feel their financials show writing on the wall for their future. But one of the reasons for that appreciation on my part was that they 1) paid a lot more, per stream, to artists (sometimes, 8-10x more than Spotify's nominal purported royalties), and 2) they didn't have an algorithm for payout that heavily favored the 800lb artists in the room over the smaller, struggling acts.
https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...
And
https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-millio...
An eye for an eye, leaves us all blind.
1. Appeasement was a big success.
2. Fascists are known for having balanced personalities that at some point have enough and don't want more.
I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.
Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.
Its not just about Spotify, but the record labels and the artists themselves.
For a community that usually wants to allow artists control over their music, or better yet people control over their own information in general. It surprises me that people are now okay with music being scraped and freely put online.
I have a lot of respect for Glenn McDonald for spam fighting all these years on Spotify, but we can go better than PCA for mapping music these days. Any neural embedding model is going to produce more meaningful axes. In fact Spotify had an intern who did just that, just before the launch of Discover Weekly: Sander Dieleman. Along with Aäron van den Oord he was snapped up by Deepmind after their Spotify internship. Those two guys were (and are) wildly good at what they do.
Following Anna's logic, I was calling on Spotify to stop "investigating" archivists. Spotify could instead be engaging constructively here, with Anna's Archive, Internet Archive, or other groups.
How many people are actually going to download a torrent client, navigate through some massive torrent file collection to check the files of the artists they want to download so they can upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?
You just need a client that can make use of it.
I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in making one however, you can already get a patched Spotify APK from the usual mobile piracy spaces that's good enough.
The metadata is 200 GB which can be easily indexed and could be made searchable, then you download only what you need
I do that not because I don't want to pay Spotify, but because it is more convenient. I want all of my music in one place (VLC), and Spotify doesn't let me export my library as OPUS or Flac. Some stuff in my library is only posted on SoundCloud, some are old mp3 recordings by friends, and another 30% are only on YouTube (small cover artists)
The more interesting part is how this is your mental model of actually "physically" owning music.
The amount of messaging that will be needed to explain how home servers are convenient is pretty crazy.
As mentioned in other stories, this is really welcomed by other big corps or LLM related companies
The only time I encountered this was after a power outage when my ISP's DHCP server handed me a new IP that was tainted. It felt like every major website was suddenly full of captchas.
Eventually I had to unplug the router for 24 hours until the ISP let go of my DHCP reservation. When I reconnected it gave me a new IP and the problems went away.
This is a archivalist institution that actively ignores "copyright" to further the art and science of our shared media legacy.
And frankly, public libraries would absolutely be deemed illegal if they were made 10 years ago. (And it was only because rich people like Rockefeller wanted to wash their actual history with a social-happy persona.)
Spotify (and netflix etc..) have become very hostile to exposing their catalogue over API, so i'm glad they've gotten open sourced :)
It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences (for lack of non-marketing speak for self curated music)
Yes, because art evolves over time.
As it very likely will with generative art.
And even with that evolution, people still use paint, and people will still use instruments and make music the same ways we always have...
My point is that photography is essentially a simulacra of reality, yet it unexpectedly created its own art form and influenced existing ones. So will the use of LLMs for generation
I don't see why this can't happen with AI, or at least I am not certain like you it can't happen
But from what I saw there are less living horses today than 200 years ago, and although that just a proxy for horse riders I believe the same applies for painters, especially non-hobbyists
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.
Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.
AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.
Much more here: https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html
Or did you just read the title of the second article and not realize it’s not being literal but capturing the anxiety of the painters in the 19th century?
Apart from that our interaction seem overly emotional for me so I'd leave it as that
It's very obvious that it's polluting and/or killing everything it touched so far though
this doesn't mean this can't be controlled by someone talented
Have you been to a contemporary art museum?
It largely killed an industry which was everywhere, sure there are still paintings and it's a primer art form. The number of paintings commissioned and number of painters fell drastically since the 19th century to the point I am willing to guess you have never had your portrait taken, something that was common place in the equivalent pay grades of today tech workers. Regarding the art form it is also arguably less important in people's life then it used to be (while museums still exist), However most music today is still mostly a profession rather than pure art for the sake of art
We can continue discussing whether the word kill is a metaphor or must be used only for a zero or one situation but I don't think that's interesting enough compared to the actual topic
"Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy"
Funny thing, I've met a lot of independent artists who don't care about piracy one bit. I have a feeling it's the record labels and large corporations, not the artists, making the biggest fuss over piracy.
For large labels, exposure is a solved problem and album sales are all that matters.
They are all trying to maximize revenue, they just have different ways of going about it.
a true gift to humanity.