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This is insane. I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this. The thing is, this doesn't even seem particu
by crazygringo 11mo ago
This is insane.
I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this.
The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. Or if the major record labels already license their entire catalogs for training purposes cheaply enough, so this really is just solely intended as a preservation effort?
- Aurornis 11mo ago> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible. I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great. > Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff. The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
- crazygringo 11mo ago> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect. And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
- nutjob2 11mo agoI think the people seeding these are also ideologs and so would be interested in also supporting the obscure stuff, maybe more than the popular. There is no way any casual listeners would go to the quite substantial trouble of using these archives. Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
- 5- 11mo ago[flagged]
- ronsor 11mo agoThey know about AI companies and don't mind AI companies, but they're not doing it because AI companies.
- jsheard 11mo ago> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies. They have a page directly addressed to AI companies, offering them "enterprise-level" access to their complete archives in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. AI may not be their original/primary motivation but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing.
- BonoboIO 11mo agoThat made me chuckle, Enterprise Level Access. I mean as ai company, that’s incredibly cheap and instead of torrenting something, why get it. That price is just a fraction of a engineers salary.
- cryzinger 11mo ago> I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great. Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-streaming-box-part-of-a-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea... Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
- shaky-carrousel 11mo agoWho cares, today is pretty easy to be part of a botnet. Having a slightly outdated lightbulb qualifies, so I'd not bother.
- Aurornis 11mo agoHaving an IoT device with security vulnerabilities does not automatically make you vulnerable to botnets because it’s behind your router’s NAT under normal conditions. Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices. The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
- shaky-carrousel 11mo agoNope, many IoT devices open ports via UPnP. The biggest botnets are composed of (among other things) smart plugs, baby monitors, doorbells, IP cameras...
- sneak 11mo agoThey’re doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for AI companies.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 11mo ago> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
- varenc 11mo agoSpotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music. To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers) I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
- tsukikage 11mo agoSpotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear. What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
- hnben 11mo agohow are some tracks more profitable to spotify than others?
- hermanzegerman 11mo agoThey were caught flooding their own playlists with specially for them produced Garbage Music for which they don't have to pay royalties https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-its-own-music-to-avoid-paying-royalties-to-artists/ https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-...
- gorbachev 11mo agoIt's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close. It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world. It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
- silcoon 11mo ago> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated. What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users. Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
- avoutos 11mo agoAgreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.
- komali2 11mo ago> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
- silcoon 11mo agoI get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
- delusional 11mo ago> There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
- wartywhoa23 11mo ago> They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies. So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then. Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain. And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
- basisword 11mo ago>> But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...? Didn't Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They're too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.
- VanTheBrand 11mo agoThey are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook annual revenue is about it twice that of the entire global recording industry. The strategy these companies took was probably correct but that calculation included the high risk of ultimately having to pay out down the line. Don’t mistake their current resistance to paying for an internal belief they never will have to.
- palata 11mo ago> They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook [...] I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt. Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
- codersfocus 11mo agoAnthropic had to pay $1.5 billion recently so you're incorrect. I'm sure more of such cases will come up against big tech too.
- palata 11mo agoIt's obviously more profitable to pay the fine than to not do the illegal thing in the first place, so I am correct.
- VanTheBrand 11mo agoThe metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably
- cm2012 11mo agoEspecially since they scraped Spotify's popularity rating as well
- input_sh 11mo agoI can't think of many situations where that would be particularly valuable, considering it favours recent plays and the cutoff date is already almost half a year old.
- vintermann 11mo agoSelf-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don't give a damn is telling. Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.
- IshKebab 11mo agoI dunno if they publish like a 10 TB torrent of the most popular music I can see people making their own music services. A 10 TB hard disk is easily affordable, and that's about 3 million songs which is way more than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, even if you reduce that by 100x to account for taste. It's probably going to make the AI music generation problem worse anyway...
- justatdotin 11mo agoI would expect more data to make ai music generation better
- cakealert 11mo agoWhen they say "worse" they do mean the AI will get better which will be worse because they are ideologically opposed to AI.
- IshKebab 11mo agoI'm not ideologically opposed to AI. The problem will get worse because while the quality of the music will improve, it will still be bad and there will also be a lot more of it. We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing. If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.
- jen729w 11mo agoThe problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators. An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific. In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this. Do they have DRM at all? Youtube and Pandora don't.
- ale42 11mo agoYes they do use DRM. I know they are using Widevine on the web player, but possibly other ones too (never looked very far). Not sure for the app, it might be that it is using OGG streams with a custom DRM (which is probably the one some existing downloaders actually (ab)use).
- Mindwipe 11mo agoYouTube Music uses Widevine.
- thaumasiotes 11mo agoIf it's on YouTube Music, it's also on... YouTube.
- charcircuit 11mo agoNot necessarily at the same quality though.
- thaumasiotes 11mo agoI assume in most cases they're literally the same files. Youtube runs "topic" channels for music that distributors have sent it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g (same thing, but on an official channel instead)
- charcircuit 11mo agoYou can load any youtube music song on youtube by just removing the "music" subdomain.
- stefan_ 11mo agoDRM aside, Spotify clearly should have logic that throttles your account based on requests (only so many minutes in a day..), making it entirely impractical to download the entirety of it unless you have millions of accounts.
- reactordev 11mo ago>unless you have millions of accounts. Challenge accepted… This is probably how they did it, over time, was use a few thousand accounts and queued up all the things, and download everything over the course of a year.
- Retr0id 11mo agoNotably 160kbit is the free-tier bitrate, so they presumably used unpaid accounts.
- cm2012 11mo agoThis leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.
- lkramer 11mo agoWhich is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.
- troupo 11mo agoSpotify pays 70% of revenue to rights holders. Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?
- injidup 11mo agoThat is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like. Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense. And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut. Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious. As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die. Content creation as a career is probably dead.
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- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- thiht 11mo ago> this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners I can imagine this making it wayyy easier to build something like Lidarr but for individual tracks instead of albums.
- fsckboy 11mo ago>The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumer it's an archive to defend against Spotify going away. Remember when Netflix had everything, and then that eroded and now you can only rely on stuff that Netflix produced itself? the average consumer will flock when Spotify ultimately enshitifies
- troupo 11mo agoNetflix didn't lose content by choice. Actual right holders decided to pull their content and create rival services. Has nothing to do with perceived enshittification by Netflix (even though they have enshittification too). Spotify is under the same threat: they have no content that they own. Everything is licensed.
- nimih 11mo agoBut, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s. Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
- troupo 11mo ago> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s. Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio. > put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place. As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
- nsteel 11mo agoI thought they started producing their own podcasts. Can't bring in much though.
- troupo 11mo agoJust like with anything digital you (and Spotify) are fully at the mercy of the rights holders. When (not if) they pull their stuff, or replace their stuff, or change their stuff, you can never get the original back unless you preserve it. Largest example: a lot of Russian music is not available on Spotify because of the Russia-Ukrane war, and Spotify pulling out of Russia. So they don't have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.
- 1dry 11mo agoThank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more? This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
- fao_ 11mo agoSpotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.
- nimih 11mo agoWhat, precisely, is the point you’re trying to make here?
- 1dry 11mo agoExpressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view" I hope readers will feel our frustration.
- nimih 11mo agoWell, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate. I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category. I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
- firefax 11mo ago>I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this. What's stopping someone from sticking a microphone next to their speaker? Slow, but effective.
- michaelmior 11mo ago> Slow, but effective. I wouldn't call this very effective. It would take an impractically long amount of time to capture a meaningful fraction of the collection and quality would suffer greatly.
- layman51 11mo agoAudio fingerprinting?
- firefax 11mo ago>Audio fingerprinting? Bought a spotify card with cash, email was registered on public wifi. Who cares? :-)
- dbalatero 11mo agoThey'd probably do a shit job of capturing it?
- coppsilgold 11mo agoEven if you plug the audio output into the input you would still be taking a quality loss by passing the audio through a DAC and then an ADC. Maybe if the quality of your hardware is good enough it wouldn't matter, but then you would be limited to only ripping 24 hours of audio per day...
- yungwarlock 11mo agoBro. Who cares. Ive got bunch of songs like this. The loss makes it more nostalgic
- firefax 11mo ago
- hkt 11mo agoId be stunned if we didn't find out Anna's Archive is a front for a handful of shadier VCs who are into AI. Even if AA themselves don't know it and just take the cash.
- londons_explore 11mo ago> Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible. Download the lot to a big Nas and get Claude to write a little fronted with song search and auto playlist recommendations?
- shevy-java 11mo ago> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that Google controls this.)
- Forgeties79 11mo agoJust cite facebook getting busted training its AI on torrents proven to contain unlicensed material lol
- madduci 11mo agoThe first users of this dataset will be Big Tech corps. Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple will all be happy to use this dataset for training their LLMs. For them, 300TB is just cheap
- ipsum2 11mo agoThey already have this data. See jukebox from OpenAI, released before chatgpt.
- gorbachev 11mo agoFlippant response: If it's ok for Meta for commercial use, why not for researchers for legitimate research work? More serious response: research is explicitly included in fair use protections in US copyright law. News organizations regularly use leaked / stolen copyrighted material in investigative journalism.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- zouhair 10mo agoBecause the laws are there to protect people with money from people who don't have money.
- zuspotirko 11mo ago> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible. Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?
- writebetterc 11mo agoI am not, how did they solve that?
- zuspotirko 10mo agoBasically there is an entity between Annas Archive and the torrents: hosters. AA has searchable metadata and a hash value. The hosters keep track of hash values, the cached files and in which torrents they are backed up, and take up almost the entire legal liability. Users search on AA what they are looking for but ultimately download it from a hoster.
- larodi 11mo agoThis, indeed, has mostly implications for ML, training, etc. As otherwise the whole catalog is available to partners, but costs a lot. So Anna did indeed liberate the content, but I'm definitely not switching off my Spotify subscription, even though, in my personal taste, neither quality, nor UI does match Apple Music. It is still useful to have s.o. serve the content for you.
- robtherobber 11mo agoI believe that we need to distinguish between convenience and preservation here. It is indeed convenient for consumers to use Spotify now whilst it exists and operates the way it does. They could go under, they could change their business model, they could decide to purge everything that is not easily justifiable commercially. As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.
- sowbug 11mo agoA little off topic, but I remain naively hopeful that the horror you describe will keep Spotify from going down the same road Netflix did once content owners decided to get into the streaming business themselves, so that streaming a movie today requires you to "change the channel" to whichever service offers that movie. Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10/month subscription?
- ccppurcell 11mo ago>The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...? Curious why not? Assuming you only used the metadata. I think they would be considered raw facts and not copyrightable.
- hugholousk 10mo agoThis makes me think that after the crack, they probably had to come up with a formula that can statistically calculate how fast they should download spotify songs without letting Spotify realizing that they're scraping the company data and block the access. Remind me of Alan Turing formula after cracking the Enigma