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.
Does this mean the MusicBrainz database will soon go from 5 million to 186 million tracks?
If I ran mb, I would be cautious importing the data directly. I’m sure Spotify would consider it trade information and go after anyone directly using it. However if a few million people added the tracks with individual edits then it probably won’t take too long.
I thought metadata couldn’t be copyrighted though?
It can’t, but I’m sure that wouldn’t stop Spotify from raising a stink if they see it being bulk imported. I’d imagine this would be similar to OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps; they probably could scrape and bulk import missing info, but they restrict it to licensed sources and user edits to limit liability and enforce quality.
In cartography the expression of the uncopyrightable data is itself copyrighted (e.g. colors used, thickness of ligns) so maybe certain data fields are owned by Spotify (e.g. genre, description, history, song notes)
That’s exactly what I was wondering too.
Acquiring high quality music is already easy enough in most cases.
What I am interested in is the metadata. Accurate tagging of all my files is of high interest.
Probably not worth it to store the AI tracks
Asking the real questions here…