Lafong Back of the envelope estimate? 300 TB is 37 percent of what Spotify has. Therefore..100 percent would occupy about 811 TB. If each song occupies about 4 MB (roughly the space occupied by a high quality mp3 of perhaps 2.75 minutes), Spotify would have about 203 million songs….ignoring anything other than the audio file itself. Is that plausible? I know nothing at all about what format Spotify uses or how many text, picture or video files are involved. Reply
usertests Lafong said: Is that plausible? https://annas-archive.org/blog/backing-up-spotify.htmlhttps://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html They say around 256 million tracks in the blog post, and it would take 700+ additional TB storage to handle what they didn't scrape. But some of them are encoded at 75 Kbps so that is affecting estimates. They say many of the least popular tracks are AI generated. Reply
cyrusfox How much of this is podcast? Those take a lot of space, even if lower encoded. Listen once and forget content. For the music 160 kbps is considered lossy, Spotify has higher tiers and lossless but I guess they went with the free content only (perhaps a clue to how they scraped so much). Reply
bit_user I don't support piracy, but I do worry about IP just "disappearing" into a black hole, due to things rights disputes, technical glitches, billing problems, and old content potentially being deleted to free up space. Imagine future civilizations sift through our archeological record and think our culture "stopped" after the 2020's, because we stopped producing books, magazines, CDs, and blurays. I think the content industry is being too greedy in their new content-as-a-service business model, and could've headed off the more principled hacks of this sort by something like creating their own locked-down archive and committing to release every copyrighted work, once its copyright expired. Reply
bit_user cyrusfox said: How much of this is podcast? Those take a lot of space, even if lower encoded. Listen once and forget content. Not only that, but now AI-generated slop, which is probably accounting for most of those never-listened or highly-unpopular tracks. Reply
bit_user S58_is_the_goat said: Did they use zip or rar to compress… Ogg Vorbis is an audio codec, similar to MP3. I haven't tried recompressing them, but the general rule of thumb is that you don't really achieve any additional compression by zipping or rar'ing an already-compressed audio or video file. Maybe a couple %, which isn't worth the practical annoyances of having to access it inside of that archive file. I think the main reason you see ZIPs or RARs of something like a CD is just for packaging purposes and maybe also the CRC. However, these tracks have no natural package structure and bittorrent provides much better checksums. By keeping the track separate, a good torrent client will let you pick and choose which files you want to torrent, so you don't have to download the entire archive. Reply
bit_user usertests said: the metadata is the point rather than the audio files. Not sure about that, given that they're an archivist group and they did go to the trouble of grabbing 300 TB worth of tracks, but I'd probably find the metadata at least as interesting as the tracks, given that most of the music can also be accessed on other services. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/streaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/streaming/pirate-archivist-group-scrapes-spotifys-300tb-library-posts-free-torrents-for-downloading-investigation-underway-as-music-and-metadata-hit-torrent-sites#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- UC San Diego Lab Advances Generative AI Research With NVIDIA DGX B200 System
- Gigabyte removes controversial leaking thermal gel from RTX 5070 Ti Windforce V2 — company opts for traditional thermal pads with updated graphics card
- Marine Biological Laboratory Explores Human Memory With AI and Virtual Reality
- [Daily Due Diligence] NVDA NVDA
- As AI Grows More Complex, Model Builders Rely on NVIDIA
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.