datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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I'd argue that no one is gonna be archiving 300tb either though and will likely be picking and choosing which files to download from the torrents.
What I don't know is if this is how Spotify is storing this music on their end or if they have some other lossless source they pull from. I know Deezer has flacs available for most stuff and mp3 320 (I think) for what isn't lossless.
Not many hobbyists are going to dedicate that much space to bad quality audio, or even have that much space to begin with.
Eh - maybe - there are definitely hoarders with the ability to absorb 300TB. They're not common, but they do exist. There are probably close to zero hoarders that could spare 3PB, especially for a collection that they won't listen to a majority of. It's like saying that it isn't worth digitizing wax tube recordings because the source is so low quality. If preservation is the goal, anything is better than nothing.
Spotify has a lossless quality option in their apps.
The link says "The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s", so I guess that's what Spotify uses for the "high" desktop/mobile setting described at https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/