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Backing up Spotify (annas-archive.li)
submitted 4 months ago by JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 42 points 4 months ago
  1. Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
  • We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
  • For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
  • For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn't the focus be on getting the least popular music first?

[-] UltraMagnus@startrek.website 13 points 4 months ago

The politics of preservation is definitely an interesting one. I suppose one argument in favor of preserving more popular music is that there are going to be fewer popular tracks than unpopular tracks - and they're already at 300TB, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it's a third the size of their existing library of ebooks.

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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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