We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity.

This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.

It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

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[–] Kirk@startrek.website 7 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I wonder why Spotify and not YouTube Music, Tidal or Apple Music all of which are higher quality.

[–] EccTM@lemmy.ml 60 points 3 days ago (1 children)

They said this in the linked blog post:

A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.

Seems like reason enough to choose to scrape Spotify to me.

[–] kilgore_trout@feddit.it 8 points 3 days ago

And Spetify's catalogue is the broadest too.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Spotify has lossless now. Although if you're listening on anything with Bluetooth then you probably won't notice anyway.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

well bluetooth always adds additional compression, so it could still make a difference

[–] Vespair@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Spotify claims to offer lossless quality on much of their catalog; is this claim false or is there something more I'm missing here?

[–] degen@midwest.social 1 points 2 days ago

That's for premium accounts, which they probably aren't scraping with. And I think it's still not FLAC quality

[–] Microtonal_Banana@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

They were trying to keep file sizes down.

[–] Frigger@feddit.uk -2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

No one can tell the difference beyond 320kbps

[–] myrrh@ttrpg.network 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

...depends on the material; i've consistently double-blinded very obvious differences at 320 VBR vs lossless and my ears are far, far from golden...

[–] Frigger@feddit.uk 1 points 10 hours ago

Publish a study if true. You would be the first

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

I'm sure there are some, namely audiophiles, but that is not who I am so I'm good with this lol.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 0 points 2 days ago

Yeah but until two months ago Spotify was 24kbps