It depends on what your goal is: If you want to preserve the music that is important to most people or to the era, you should start with the most popular stuff. And Spotify has a big spam problem. Everybody who thinks he is a DJ wants his music to be on there and there is so much AI music flooding the scene. So it does make sense to backup what people are actually listening and not some AI-generated music spam nobody cares about.
Comment on Backing up Spotify
arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
- Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
- We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
- For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
- For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.
Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn’t the focus be on getting the least popular music first?
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 2 days ago
mrdown@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I am pretty sure the major labels are already preserving the most mainstream artists. Msybe it should be sorting by the most popular independent artists
arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
I mean, they say earlier that music is actually well-preserved, but it’s disproportionately popular music. If the goal is then to preserve everything, I’d expect them to go for stuff that isn’t likely to be in some random audiophile’s collection or whatever then.
Techlos@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
If you want that long tail, bandcamp and soundcloud are better sources. The barrier to entry is low with those, and there’s a plethora of small, niche artists just doing their own thing.
For a representative snapshot of music though, it’s pretty amazing. It shows what a massive percentage of the planet listens to, preserved hopefully across many seeds, and historians will love shit like this in the future.
UltraMagnus@startrek.website 2 days ago
The politics of preservation is definitely an interesting one. I suppose one argument in favor of preserving more popular music is that there are going to be fewer popular tracks than unpopular tracks - and they’re already at 300TB, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it’s a third the size of their existing library of ebooks.
dustyData@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If we were talking about the ethnic music of an extinct tribe that uses a language on risk of disappearing, sure, you would be right.
But think about it for a bit longer. They are just a commercial production that had no cultural impact in a population. They are still getting preserved in a format with a quality degradation that is imperceptible to the human ear. That’s usually enough. Audiophiles are usually overzealous about fidelity preservation. But the efforts are often misguided and discussions abound on technical topics that ultimately don’t matter.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I agree. I seed torrents/files that took me a long time to finish.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Unfortunately if you sort by least popular musicon Spotify, you’ll get nothing but spam