They only need to say they are training a AI on the data to make it legal
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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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).
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.
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.
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).
Fans could publish an idea for a song they like and donate $5 or whatever.
i'm a musician and i don't really like the idea of Cameo-ing music. Also, $5 is not nearly enough.
Well, if it stays at $5 then it’s probably not a popular idea. If 1000 people like the idea and each put $5, now we’re talking $5k. Still probably not quite enough, but it is producing income via a novel way of getting in touch with the audience.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.
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 had copy cats to replace King Glizard and the Lizard Wizard when they pulled their albums from Spotify
If you use Spotify to listen to artists, you certainly don't actually respect them. Fuck you people who give money to Spotify.
Is there an alternative way to contribute to them? I would happily send money directly to the artists, but I don't know how
Bandcamp is what my bands like to use. They often have events (Bandcamp Fridays) where 100% of purchases go to the artists. Some bands also make decent money off merch sales from their own storefronts
Artists tend to have websites where they sell their music or link to places where they sell it.
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Any sauce on the KGLW story? Had not heard of this.
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I'm sure it's been scraped plenty of times by AI companies who are doing way more damage.
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.
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.
No reason this would be mutually exclusive.
These millions of audio files have done nothing wrong. Keeping them locked away is scandalous. Release them immediately !
/dad joke, sorry
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Just remember to try really hard to not to seed it and say it's training data... And it's fair use.
Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start
Hahahaha
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.
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. Piracy 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.
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. Like a digital equivalent to paying cash for a CD at a concert — no exchange of PII, no tracking, no subscriptions, no marketing bs, etc.
I suppose that applies to any digital content format. It's a shame that privacy has become such a low priority.
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.
I don’t support piracy either. I just torrent it for free. 🏴☠️
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.
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.
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"... Found to be 48% AI Slop"
I hope musicbrainz hops on the metadata list
I used some software to download music from them and they locked me out of my account for violating their ToS.
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