As far as I’ve read, the database is largely low bitrate files, and some AI. The value here is metadata and preservation of “rare” music.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Nope, I would not call 160kbps Vorbis low bitrate, it’s roughly quality of 192kbps MP3. Only the ”popularity=0” stuff (so stuff with so few listens that Spotify does not keep record of) were re-encoded to 75kbps Opus, which as a modern codec is much better than it sounds like but of course re-encode is not great for already lossy stuff.
For purists there are those Tidal downloader sites available everywhere for free lossless music, even 24-bit hires FLAC.
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All tracks within the top 99.6% of listens are supposed to be high quality
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Anna's the GOAT
Sounds more like the pirate queen.
Is this new? Aren't most tracks already available in torrents?
It's new insofar as this is one big scrape. About 300TB iirc.
300tb is a lot, but its kind of crazy to think this entire company only needs 300tb storage arrays to function. I wonder how they handle things internally. I would imagine at least 1 backup server ready to go in HA. I wonder if they have multiple regions across the country that also serves up the same setup.
Likely cloned Netflix's "netflix in a box" design, where they drop a large 200TB+ NAS in thousands of different CDN datecenters with their most popular content cached so that total traffic is minimal across the internet at large.
Spotify mainly being music with very little video likely makes this even easier.
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I wish I could think anything positive about this, but I can't imagine anyone who actually cares about music needs or wants this. Instead it'll almost certainly be used as an illegal and unethical dataset to further train bullshit AI to make slop songs. As easy as it is for people to claim "preservation", I do have to question the motives of stuff like this...
Fuck AI. Support your favorite human artists.
I mean, it seems like the perfect avenue to replicate Stremio / Kodi but for music
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Wasn’t all of this shit already available as torrents?
You could hand pluck grains of rice out of a field or just steal a 25lb bag.
Which would you prefer?
In case of this, definitely the grains.
Most of this rice is not worth stealing :D
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No.
Not everything got torrented after music streamers came into prominence. (Though chances are pretty good you could rip an MP3 off Youtube for whatever you're looking for.)
Ripping Mp3s off YouTube Music Videos is without a doubt the worst method of piracy I've ever heard of.
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