By Joe Wilkins, Futurism | Hacktivists with the group Anna’s Archive — a search engine for shadow libraries, which are unauthorized collections of digital content — say they’ve found a way to download virtually the entirety of Spotify for preservation.
In a blog post detailing their work, the archivists say they’ve archived the audio of some 86 million songs so far, representing 99.6 percent of total listens on the streaming service. They scraped metadata from nearly the entire Spotify library, however, which is some 300 terabytes in size, spanning 256 million tracks. There are 15.43 million artists represented, and 58.6 million albums.
According to the blog post, it constitutes the “largest publicly available music metadata database” to date, and is the first step toward building a “preservation archive” for music.
Compared to books or articles, popular music is already pretty well archived, a fact the activists acknowledge. However, they say current preservation collections are too focused on the most popular commercial songs — the ones already widely available, compared to, say, experimental art music — and too focused on the highest quality file formats.
Along with the files, the hacktivists sorted the song metadata and analyzed it in their blog post. The result is a fascinating birds-eye view of the Spotify catalogue that was previously unavailable to the public.
. . . . . . . . . .
Go here to read stats and details that Spotify keeps hidden:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/activists-downloaded-pretty-much-all-of-spotify/