this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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570
Spotify Music Library Scraped by Pirate Activist Group (www.billboard.com)
submitted 5 days ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] FoxyFerengi@startrek.website 210 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.

Lmao. They protect and defend artist rights so hard they they've refused to pay a fair compensation, and have taken it further by promoting AI artists over actual artists. This statement is almost comical after it was reported that they've had copy cats to replace King Glizard and the Lizard Wizard when they pulled their albums from Spotify

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If you use Spotify to listen to artists, you certainly don't actually respect them. Fuck you people who give money to Spotify.

[–] reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Is there an alternative way to contribute to them? I would happily send money directly to the artists, but I don't know how

[–] FoxyFerengi@startrek.website 9 points 4 days ago

Bandcamp is what my bands like to use. They often have events (Bandcamp Fridays) where 100% of purchases go to the artists. Some bands also make decent money off merch sales from their own storefronts

[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

Artists tend to have websites where they sell their music or link to places where they sell it.

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[–] Tiger_Man_@szmer.info 4 points 5 days ago

It have never been a fight against privacy, it's a fight against freedom

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 120 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm sure it's been scraped plenty of times by AI companies who are doing way more damage.

[–] RightEdofer@lemmy.ca 36 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah but that’s damage to artists. AI music gives Spotify something to put into a playlist that they don’t have to pay even their meagre rate to.

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It hurts record companies. They want to own all AI generated music. It's quite clear with what happened to udio. It's monopolies against open source, not AI against artists.

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[–] Zarajevo@feddit.org 26 points 4 days ago

They only need to say they are training a AI on the data to make it legal

[–] snoons@lemmy.ca 78 points 5 days ago

[–] gointhefridge@lemmy.zip 42 points 4 days ago (11 children)

I’m an artist with music on Spotify. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.

I know Metallica got a lot of shit about Napster back in the day, but I can’t help but feel like they were right. They were (by my recollection) trying to ensure artists still have a claim to their body of work. I know the industry has come so far since then, but it feels like the moment everything started to slowly become “content” and not art.

I just want real people to actually enjoy my music. I don’t expect to make a living or even real money off my music, but I also don’t like someone else making money off my art and using it to train AI models.

I made something meaningful, no one else gets to decide that they wanna commodify it or use it to make slop.

[–] Terminarchs@slrpnk.net 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

From a musician to another, as someone else replied, if you're making your work available digitally then you immediately lose control over if people pay for it or not. The good thing is, the ones who want to support you will if you give them a way. But you just can't coerce them anymore. Spotify and other similar platforms are getting the whole cake because of the convenience that they offer, that's it. And I'm sure you know how little of that cake trickles down to you.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

As a listener, if a band I like is touring within 2 hours of where I live, I go see them live and get a shirt

I hope that's helping them more than whether I listen to a scraped digital copy or not

[–] littleomid@feddit.org 19 points 4 days ago (3 children)

As a former professional, now semi professional musician: we make our money playing gigs and selling merchandise, not by getting paid by Spotify. Go ahead, pirate all you want. But also go to shows, buy merch, if the bands are on bandcamp, buy their shit.

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[–] Horsey@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Anything you post online should be considered permanently online. It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online. The way I think about it is that anything I put online is for everyone, good or bad, and not for profit.

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[–] mrdown@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago

People are able to download your music illegally if they aware you exists and ai companies was also able to train models before the scrape

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 4 days ago

This was done by an archival group, primarily for the purposes of preservation. Don't know if it helps make you feel better, but at least personally I think complete archives of human cultural output, if possible, are important. So much has already been lost over the course of history

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

I get why this feels personal, but I think there’s a deeper problem with the framing. The internet was never meant to be anyone’s marketplace. It was meant to be a place for people to share ideas and work freely, not a storefront.

The moment we decided the internet should function like a sales platform, artificial scarcity became inevitable. That’s when art turned into “content,” and creativity got optimized for algorithms instead of people. Freedom and monetization can’t really coexist online the business model always wins.

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[–] dusty_raven@discuss.online 44 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I thought it was gonna be some no-name group that was gonna hold it ransom etc. But it's actually by Anna's-archive. I don't really condone piracy (pay the people who make art, and those who make it accessible), but if anyone was going to do it, I'm glad it's them.

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 26 points 5 days ago

I don’t support piracy either. I just torrent it for free. 🏴‍☠️

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

We should stop pretending piracy is some fringe problem instead of a pressure valve. When artists and creators use the internet primarily to sell and self-promote, they’re still participating in the same system even if they’re not Facebook or Spotify. Scale doesn’t change the outcome.

We can’t have the internet we claim to want and treat it like a digital busking space. Those two ideas don’t coexist. Once monetization enters, everything starts bending toward the same endgame, tracking, ads, artificial walls, data collection, subscriptions. It always converges there.

Content creators are part of the enshittification problem. Piracy is a stopgap response to it. A way people push back against a system that turns sharing into commerce. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the result of trying to force a market model onto a space that was built for sharing ideas and collaboration, not sales.

[–] percent@infosec.pub 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I'd be excited if I stumbled upon an artist that I like, and they'd accept some private payment method (maybe Monero or something) for their music in a lossless format. Like a digital equivalent to paying cash for a CD at a concert — no exchange of PII, no tracking, no subscriptions, no marketing bs, etc.

I suppose that applies to any digital content format. It's a shame that privacy has become such a low priority.

[–] dusty_raven@discuss.online 3 points 4 days ago

Piracy can be used to push back against an unfair or immoral capitalist system, but the people who create and disseminate the art also live in the capitalist system. By all means, subvert the system if you want (it may be the right thing to do), but minimize collateral damage to things you want to support.

[–] A_A@lemmy.world 37 points 5 days ago (2 children)

These millions of audio files have done nothing wrong. Keeping them locked away is scandalous. Release them immediately !
/dad joke, sorry

[–] SpacePanda@mander.xyz 6 points 5 days ago

How dare they, someone should call, PETM. People for the ethical treatment of music. Those poor songs locked up all day.

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[–] DandomRude@lemmy.world 36 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Spotify absolutely deserves to be singled out for its exploitative practices, especially since this company is largely responsible for musicians not being paid fairly for their hard work. It's just a shame that there's hardly anything to steal here other than people's hard work, to which Spotify has contributed nothing - but that applies to all companies that are successful on the internet today. Without exception, all of these companies are built on the same platform logic: the content that these companies exploit is paid for with starvation wages, if at all (not at all in the case of LLMs).

Therefore, I cannot see anything positive in this because it does not change the underlying problem in the slightest.

[–] mrdown@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The major labels are still the biggest evil

Spotify & Co. make advance payments to the labels to be allowed to use their music catalogues. These advance payments are then recouped with the streaming revenues. However, if the revenue is less than the advance, the difference remains with the labels as “breakage”. If a streaming service pays a label US $1 million as an advance for the contract period, but the label’s catalogue is only streamed to the value of US $750,000, then the label has US $250,000 in additional revenue that does not have to be distributed to the artists.

https://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/the-music-streaming-economy-part-18-breakage-in-the-digital-age/?hl=en-US#%3A%7E%3Atext=It+is+revenue+that+cannot%2C5%5D

[–] DandomRude@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Nevertheless, Spotify makes more profit than any music label, even more than all the remaining music labels combined. This is how it works today: music, literature, journalism, and art no longer exist according to this logic - only content. And as disrespectful as the term sounds, that's how it's paid for - with scrabs because that's the business model.

Your pirate approach is no longer up to date, because it is no longer directed against large corporations, but robs artists of the little they have left. This will only accelerate the trend: no one will try to make a living from art anymore. If you think that people will do it anyway because they want to express themselves, I think you are absolutely wrong.

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[–] yggstyle@lemmy.world 26 points 5 days ago

Just remember to try really hard to not to seed it and say it's training data... And it's fair use.

[–] Kben@lemmy.zip 26 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Lars Ulrich is raging,he's gonna sue.

[–] nullPointer@programming.dev 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

gonna have to wait an extra 2 months to get that gold plated shark tank.

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[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 18 points 5 days ago

Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start

Hahahaha

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 15 points 5 days ago

"... Found to be 48% AI Slop"

[–] breadguy@kbin.earth 10 points 5 days ago

I hope musicbrainz hops on the metadata list

[–] sam@break3.social 4 points 4 days ago

Spotify saying they are here for artists well actively scraping there content to create AI Slop is kinda stupid.

Well I want artists to be paid spotify often doesn't pay them fairly it's one of the reasons I personally try to pay for a direct copy of the music I listen to, to own and use the MP3 in whatever way I see fit (for personal use).

[–] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I used some software to download music from them and they locked me out of my account for violating their ToS.

[–] oldest_meme_420@hilariouschaos.com 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Where will all of this be posted? .. So that I can avoid it, ofc.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Anna’s

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