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This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.

by cm2012 10mo ago

lkramer 10mo ago
Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.
- troupo 10mo ago
  Spotify 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 10mo ago
    That 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.
    - troupo 10mo ago
      > 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 No, you literally can't.
    - saaaaaam 10mo ago
      (a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid. (b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.) (c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
      - woctordho 10mo ago
        There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).
        saaaaaam 10mo ago
        That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?
  - lkramer 10mo ago
    They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.
- dehrmann 10mo ago
  I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.
  - ninjin 10mo ago
    Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.
    - cess11 10mo ago
      No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta". The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB. After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
      - ninjin 10mo ago
        Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.
        grvbck 10mo ago
        When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ". Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.
chrneu 10mo ago
this argument is so tired. most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them. most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em. Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars. youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money. now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.
- nospice 10mo ago
  > most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them. I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control. Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
  - chrneu 10mo ago
    > I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture. Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream. That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams. I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly. also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists. piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.
hermanzegerman 10mo ago
Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?
- chrneu 10mo ago
  yeah it's wild to me how folks will defend the current status quo when it's clearly broken. people defend convenience way too much. spotify isn't good for us and spotify-like-streaming is destroying the music industry.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  Spotify pays the rightsholders. What are they supposed to do about the shitty contracts that the artists signs with the labels?
  - hermanzegerman 10mo ago
    They don't pay any artist who has less than 1000/Streams per Song per Year. They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments. Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify. If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch. I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about. Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
  - Aldipower 10mo ago
    I am providing my own music on Spotify via a distributor I a pay 50 Euros once. What do I get from Spotify? Basically nothing! It is not the rightholders as I am the rightholder! Spotify is a scam for artist.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Nemo_bis 10mo ago
cedws 10mo ago
I just started DJing and something I quickly noticed is how garbage Spotify's music sounds compared to FLACs I've purchased. The max bitrate is very low.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 10mo ago
  tidal is a thing and can be scraped the same way. I wonder how big that collection would be as it can go from 50mb to 300mb for 3min
- tandr 10mo ago
  Spotify just (last week or 2 weeks ago) introduced lossless compression (FLAC) and it sounds amazing.
  - cedws 10mo ago
    Wow didn't know about that, thanks.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.

by cm2012 10mo ago

This leak will also be really useful to bad actors who will resell the music from this list without paying royalties to the artists.

lkramer 10mo ago

Which is how Spotify started... And is still carrying on. So nothing has changed.

troupo 10mo ago
Spotify 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 10mo ago
  That 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.
  - troupo 10mo ago
    > 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 No, you literally can't.
  - saaaaaam 10mo ago
    (a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid. (b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.) (c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
    - woctordho 10mo ago
      There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).
      - saaaaaam 10mo ago
        That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?
- lkramer 10mo ago
  They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.
dehrmann 10mo ago
I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.
- ninjin 10mo ago
  Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.
  - cess11 10mo ago
    No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta". The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB. After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
    - ninjin 10mo ago
      Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.
      - grvbck 10mo ago
        When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ". Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.

chrneu 10mo ago

this argument is so tired. most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them. most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em. Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars. youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money. now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.

nospice 10mo ago
> most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them. I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control. Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
- chrneu 10mo ago
  > I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture. Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream. That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams. I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly. also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists. piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.

hermanzegerman 10mo ago

Spotify fucks over most artists anyway, so who cares?

chrneu 10mo ago
yeah it's wild to me how folks will defend the current status quo when it's clearly broken. people defend convenience way too much. spotify isn't good for us and spotify-like-streaming is destroying the music industry.
raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
Spotify pays the rightsholders. What are they supposed to do about the shitty contracts that the artists signs with the labels?
- hermanzegerman 10mo ago
  They don't pay any artist who has less than 1000/Streams per Song per Year. They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments. Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify. If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch. I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about. Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
- Aldipower 10mo ago
  I am providing my own music on Spotify via a distributor I a pay 50 Euros once. What do I get from Spotify? Basically nothing! It is not the rightholders as I am the rightholder! Spotify is a scam for artist.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Nemo_bis 10mo ago

cedws 10mo ago

I just started DJing and something I quickly noticed is how garbage Spotify's music sounds compared to FLACs I've purchased. The max bitrate is very low.

ThatMedicIsASpy 10mo ago
tidal is a thing and can be scraped the same way. I wonder how big that collection would be as it can go from 50mb to 300mb for 3min
tandr 10mo ago
Spotify just (last week or 2 weeks ago) introduced lossless compression (FLAC) and it sounds amazing.
- cedws 10mo ago
  Wow didn't know about that, thanks.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]