Graham Sutherland / PolynomialDec 20

Anna's Archive backed up Spotify. They got 99.9% of metadata, and 300TB of music representing 86 million tracks - original 160kbps OGG for tracks with popularity>0, and re-encoded 75kbps for popularity=0. absolutely wild project.

the metadata in particular is a hugely useful data source. MusicBrainz catalogues 5 million unique ISRCs (like ISBNs but for music releases), whereas this archive has a whopping 186 million.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

Backing up Spotify

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

Show threadPrincess Serena Star ✨Dec 20
@gsuberland not complaining but like... doesn't Spotify also have lossless flacs of tracks too? Or is it only OGGs?
Show threadGraham Sutherland / Polynomial
@Starcross read the blog post, they explain why they chose to archive the OGGs.
Dec 20 at 10:39pmWeb
Show threadPrincess Serena Star ✨Dec 20
@gsuberland Yeaahhh shortly after I posted I clicked on the link and saw it say about how lossless collections make the sizes way too large to be able to store everything
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialDec 20
@Starcross yep. and technically they didn't store everything, since they chose not to archive anything in the lower 50th percentile of secondary popularity metrics for the popularity=0 bucket, but that's a small price to pay for being able to create the world's largest open collection of music and music metadata.