this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Anna’s Archive’s idealism doesn’t quite survive its own blog post

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[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

By not bothering with all the musical chaff in Spotify's catalog, the Anna's Archive team is apparently content to let those less popular songs languish despite their claim to want to avoid focusing on just the most popular artists.

Okay Mr The Register writer, tell me how you would handle creating and wrangling a petabyte sized torrent

[–] hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago

Yes, "preserve culture" 😉

[–] Shamber@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

So, they are complaining about how Spotify is under paying and robbing the artist, and they thought well, the solution would be to dumb all their music online for free?

[–] 6nk06@sh.itjust.works 50 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I love how titles change. Compare it with "Hacktivist named Zuck scrapes Anna's archive to steal more billions."

I know for sure all the ai companies are on that torrent. Expect new music models.

[–] octoshrimpy@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

~~186 million. Not 86 million. There's 100 million difference there. ~~

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

This article ~~is trash and ~~did not bother reading the source blog about "why didn't they just grab all songs then?"

Edit: octo can't read on Mondays apparently.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 week ago

You are confusing "186 million unique ISRCs" with "86 million music files".

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

did not bother reading the source blog

That's rich given the source blog says "86 million music files" the paragraph after saying 186 million unique ISRCs. You apparently read less of it than The Register's writer did.

[–] ieatpwns@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

I don’t think there’s any reason to trust Spotify saying they’ve figured out how ppl were scraping. As far as I’m aware I don’t think AA mentioned how they were scraping

[–] morto@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'd love to make a similar thing with google maps and store their high resolution remote sensing images in a georeferenced format, but I don't have enough storage for even 1% of that.

[–] kugel7c@feddit.org 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think Anna's archive actually has a bounty on that or at least a very related task.

So if you've found a way to economically scrape the street view 360° pictures definitely let them know. As far as I understand if you can prove you have a working method for scraping they will do what they can in terms of infrastructure and such to get it done.

The gitlab on which this is explained is down for me atm.

[–] morto@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago

Thanks for letting me know. I will definitely check it out in my free time after the holidays!

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Pirating music is genuinely just not worth the effort so I honestly belive them. Probably didn't scrape all of them simply because that's a petabyte of storage or more.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

I'm not sure exactly how "listens" maps on to total songs, but it sounds like they got almost all of them

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Over 250 million total so about 1/3.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 6 days ago

Oh right. So I guess that means the majority of stuff uploaded to Spotify never really gets listened to.