I’m sure it’s been scraped plenty of times by AI companies who are doing way more damage.
Spotify Music Library Scraped by Pirate Activist Group
Submitted 3 weeks ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.billboard.com/business/streaming/spotify-music-library-leak-1236143970/
Comments
solrize@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
RightEdofer@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yeah but that’s damage to artists. AI music gives Spotify something to put into a playlist that they don’t have to pay even their meagre rate to.
Grimy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It hurts record companies. They want to own all AI generated music. It’s quite clear with what happened to udio. It’s monopolies against open source, not AI against artists.
snoons@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
gointhefridge@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I’m an artist with music on Spotify. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.
I know Metallica got a lot of shit about Napster back in the day, but I can’t help but feel like they were right. They were (by my recollection) trying to ensure artists still have a claim to their body of work. I know the industry has come so far since then, but it feels like the moment everything started to slowly become “content” and not art.
I just want real people to actually enjoy my music. I don’t expect to make a living or even real money off my music, but I also don’t like someone else making money off my art and using it to train AI models.
I made something meaningful, no one else gets to decide that they wanna commodify it or use it to make slop.
Horsey@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Anything you post online should be considered permanently online. It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online. The way I think about it is that anything I put online is for everyone, good or bad, and not for profit.
wondrous_strange@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think that was op of the top comment here said - that they post it for everyone, without expecting a profit, for people to enjoy. But scummy actors are using their art to gain profit in immoral methods.
To bring the 2 points together - once something is online(fully agree with what you said) bad actors will inevitably use it to gain profit and commoditize it.
Terminarchs@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
From a musician to another, as someone else replied, if you’re making your work available digitally then you immediately lose control over if people pay for it or not. The good thing is, the ones who want to support you will if you give them a way. But you just can’t coerce them anymore. Spotify and other similar platforms are getting the whole cake because of the convenience that they offer, that’s it. And I’m sure you know how little of that cake trickles down to you.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As a listener, if a band I like is touring within 2 hours of where I live, I go see them live and get a shirt
I hope that’s helping them more than whether I listen to a scraped digital copy or not
littleomid@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
As a former professional, now semi professional musician: we make our money playing gigs and selling merchandise, not by getting paid by Spotify. Go ahead, pirate all you want. But also go to shows, buy merch, if the bands are on bandcamp, buy their shit.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Random idea: do you think a platform for crowd sourcing / funding ideas could go well for musicians? Like a feature request in software, where users can like a post about a feature to show interest, except it would use dollars instead of likes. Fans could publish an idea for a song they like and donate $5 or whatever. If it’s a popular idea, more people donate to it and the artist takes notice (having now been somewhat paid to produce it).
mrdown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
People are able to download your music illegally if they aware you exists and ai companies was also able to train models before the scrape
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
This was done by an archival group, primarily for the purposes of preservation. Don’t know if it helps make you feel better, but at least personally I think complete archives of human cultural output, if possible, are important. So much has already been lost over the course of history
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I get why this feels personal, but I think there’s a deeper problem with the framing. The internet was never meant to be anyone’s marketplace. It was meant to be a place for people to share ideas and work freely, not a storefront.
The moment we decided the internet should function like a sales platform, artificial scarcity became inevitable. That’s when art turned into “content,” and creativity got optimized for algorithms instead of people. Freedom and monetization can’t really coexist online the business model always wins.
deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t think it was a good idea to upload it to Spotify then.
gointhefridge@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
For the record, I support piracy and don’t mind that people listen to my music for free. I don’t like other companies making money off it though. They didn’t make it, they don’t get to use it to make money.
Its not so much the money I’m not making, it’s the theft of hard work artists put in and corporations profit off of that makes me upset.
In 2019 the only way to reach people was Spotify. It’s still kinda the biggest game in town. It’s slowly changing but the business and ideas of digital ownership of rights were different 7 years ago.
nightlily@leminal.space 2 weeks ago
And it’s probably training gen AI models as we speak to put music artists out of what little profitable work there is left. Very few people value music as much as they do visual art.
dusty_raven@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
I thought it was gonna be some no-name group that was gonna hold it ransom etc. But it’s actually by Anna’s-archive. I don’t really condone piracy (pay the people who make art, and those who make it accessible), but if anyone was going to do it, I’m glad it’s them.
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
I don’t support piracy either. I just torrent it for free. 🏴☠️
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We should stop pretending piracy is some fringe problem instead of a pressure valve. When artists and creators use the internet primarily to sell and self-promote, they’re still participating in the same system even if they’re not Facebook or Spotify. Scale doesn’t change the outcome.
We can’t have the internet we claim to want and treat it like a digital busking space. Those two ideas don’t coexist. Once monetization enters, everything starts bending toward the same endgame, tracking, ads, artificial walls, data collection, subscriptions. It always converges there.
Content creators are part of the enshittification problem. Privacy is a stopgap response to it. A way people push back against a system that turns sharing into commerce. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the result of trying to force a market model onto a space that was built for sharing ideas and collaboration, not sales.
percent@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
I’d be excited if I stumbled upon an artist that I like, and they’d accept some private payment method (maybe Monero or something) for their music in a lossless format.
I suppose that applies to any digital content format. It’s a shame that privacy has become such a low priority.
dusty_raven@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Piracy can be used to push back against an unfair or immoral capitalist system, but the people who create and disseminate the art also live in the capitalist system. By all means, subvert the system if you want (it may be the right thing to do), but minimize collateral damage to things you want to support.
A_A@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
These millions of audio files have done nothing wrong. Keeping them locked away is scandalous. Release them immediately !
/dad joke, sorrySpacePanda@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
How dare they, someone should call, PETM. People for the ethical treatment of music. Those poor songs locked up all day.
dustyData@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I dare to wage that the top 1000 most popular artists entire body of work is already freely available in torrent form. The remainder of artists will benefit from an independent archival point of view.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Spotify absolutely deserves to be singled out for its exploitative practices, especially since this company is largely responsible for musicians not being paid fairly for their hard work. It’s just a shame that there’s hardly anything to steal here other than people’s hard work, to which Spotify has contributed nothing - but that applies to all companies that are successful on the internet today. Without exception, all of these companies are built on the same platform logic: the content that these companies exploit is paid for with starvation wages, if at all (not at all in the case of LLMs).
Therefore, I cannot see anything positive in this because it does not change the underlying problem in the slightest.
mrdown@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The major labels are still the biggest evil
Spotify & Co. make advance payments to the labels to be allowed to use their music catalogues. These advance payments are then recouped with the streaming revenues. However, if the revenue is less than the advance, the difference remains with the labels as “breakage”. If a streaming service pays a label US $1 million as an advance for the contract period, but the label’s catalogue is only streamed to the value of US $750,000, then the label has US $250,000 in additional revenue that does not have to be distributed to the artists.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nevertheless, Spotify makes more profit than any music label, even more than all the remaining music labels combined. This is how it works today: music, literature, journalism, and art no longer exist according to this logic - only content. And as disrespectful as the term sounds, that’s how it’s paid for - with scrabs because that’s the business model.
Your pirate approach is no longer up to date, because it is no longer directed against large corporations, but robs artists of the little they have left. This will only accelerate the trend: no one will try to make a living from art anymore. If you think that people will do it anyway because they want to express themselves, I think you are absolutely wrong.
Zarajevo@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
They only need to say they are training a AI on the data to make it legal
yggstyle@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Just remember to try really hard to not to seed it and say it’s training data… And it’s fair use.
Kben@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Lars Ulrich is raging,he’s gonna sue.
HornedMeatBeast@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
nullPointer@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
gonna have to wait an extra 2 months to get that gold plated shark tank.
sgtpugg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The sharks are gonna be so bummed, I know they had their hearts set on it.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start
Hahahaha
hansolo@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
“… Found to be 48% AI Slop”
breadguy@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
I hope musicbrainz hops on the metadata list
oldest_meme_420@hilariouschaos.com 3 weeks ago
Where will all of this be posted? … So that I can avoid it, ofc.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Anna’s
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I used some software to download music from them and they locked my out of my account for violating their ToS.
sam@break3.social 2 weeks ago
Spotify saying they are here for artists well actively scraping there content to create AI Slop is kinda stupid.
Well I want artists to be paid spotify often doesn't pay them fairly it's one of the reasons I personally try to pay for a direct copy of the music I listen to, to own and use the MP3 in whatever way I see fit (for personal use).
WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Wasn’t it just meta data?
filcuk@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
No, they just released metadata as the first batch. The rest will follow.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
So far.
handsoffmydata@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Eww, why scrape that cesspool of AI generated slop?
slurp@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
One thing I’ve seen people talking about is the metadata library, which is apparently very good
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 3 weeks ago
Does it have vector embeddings of all the songs if they did it would be great for building a foss recommendation algorithm
Goretantath@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Because before the AI slop there was real content that was only ever released to Spotify.
FoxyFerengi@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
Lmao. They protect and defend artist rights so hard they they’ve refused to pay a fair compensation, and have taken it further by promoting AI artists over actual artists. This statement is almost comical after it was reported that they’ve showed a copy cats to replace King Glizard and the Lizard Wizard after they pulled their albums from Spotify
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
If you use Spotify to listen to artists, you certainly don’t actually respect them. Fuck you people who give money to Spotify.
reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Is there an alternative way to contribute to them? I would happily send money directly to the artists, but I don’t know how
extremeboredom@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Any sauce on the KGLW story? Had not heard of this.
FoxyFerengi@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
nme.com/…/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-hit-…
Tiger_Man_@szmer.info 3 weeks ago
It have never been a fight against privacy, it’s a fight against freedom