Spotify Disables Accounts After Open-Source Group Scrapes 86 Million Songs From Platform (therecord.media) 27
After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping."
"We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "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." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added.
Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."
"We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "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." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added.
Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."
Its funny but who cares? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They're going to launch it in tranches by popularity. Probably by genre and artist too. Unless you have bizarre eclectic tastes they will likely have all the music you might want and all the adjacent stuff, in a reasonable package.
Cutting out 99.9% leaves the most popular 210,000 songs in about 300GB. Metadata is the big prize I think. It's not like you can't just open Spotify and hear what you want.
More about the analysis of the metadata in https://annas-archive.org/blog... [annas-archive.org] /Heavy chart analysis, and they
Re: (Score:3)
The metadata analysis is interesting.
The recent explosive growth in automatically generated "music" (shown here [annas-archive.org] make it likely that we will soon reach the maximum number of copyrightable 4-note combinations that can exist.
What then?
Re: (Score:2)
Can't wait for the groovy A flat, Asus4-G sharp-sus5, F sharp add11 song, with the C minor dim7 root for the bridge.
Re: Its funny but who cares? (Score:1)
Barn doors closed and locked (Score:5, Insightful)
the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible
Those cows have left the barn and they ain't coming back.
Re: Barn doors closed and locked (Score:2)
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Yeah, Spotify will most certainly ban all other accounts just so that no more is leaked.
Nefarious accounts (Score:3)
Well, Mr Charles (Chuck) U. Farley. So much for your Spotify account. Good luck finding any music to listen to.
"stand with the artist community" haha (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"stand with the artist community" haha (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
They stand behind the royalty holders who are rarely the artists.
Spotify will get it taken down (Score:2)
I hope people copy the archive far and wide before that happens. It's needed for posterity because Spotify can't be trusted with it.
Re: (Score:3)
It's a torrent. If 2-3 people download it in full you have no chance to take it down anymore.
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Artists make money from the artistic performances they give, Mr. Copyright Laywer. The money from the rest of the merchandise pays copyright lawyers. Nothing of value will be lost if that revenue vanishes completely and you go back to chasing ambulances.
Sure, that'll learn 'em!! (Score:1)
So it's OK when an AI conpany does it... (Score:2)
... but it is evil when a private open source project does it?
I see!
Hahaha (Score:3)
Spotty Collateral Damage (Score:3)
The Spotty plugin for Lyrion Music Server [lyrion.org], formerly Logitech Media Server, formerly Slimserver - one of the best, if not the best open source music player ecosystem out there appears to be a casualty [github.com] of this. Looks like after "the big scrape", Spotify has tightened down their APIs and have for the time being locked out 3rd party players of Spotify music. Lyrion itself of course still works fine, but you can no longer stream Spotify via it. This sucks because while I can use the Spotify app on my phone or computer, if I want to have music playing throughout the house, there isn't a good way to synchronize multiple Spotify players. Lyrion has been able to synchronize players for multi-room playback way back to the Slimserver days (and way before Sonos was a thing.)
If the Spotty developer can't get it working again, I will likely drop my paid Spotify subscription and have to get my streaming music elsewhere, as the only reason I pay for Spotify is that it has been easy to stream through Lyrion. I suppose I can start downloading from Anna's...
Absolutely no beef here against the Spotty developer, they had the API rug pulled out from under them, and it's not yet clear if there will be a technical solution.
Dropping API support for paid customers is a great way to drive those customers to piracy.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently it is an API tightening, and not a ban. The dev says this:
Maybe the situation isn't as bad as I initially thought - and my own code is more to blame for the failure than I through... the years of tweaks and workarounds for ever changing requirements wrt. authentication have left some cruft which rendered the auth mechanism and token handling in a somewhat unpredictable state.
I'm most likely going to rip this all out and start afresh, as, like @mgw2013 mentioned, my own tests using standard methods outside Spotty proved to be successful. Now I only have to rewrite this all. But that will not be in time for your favourite Christmas playlist to be played on your beloved diner room Squeezebox over the Holidays.
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Apparently it is an API tightening, and not a ban.
That's encouraging news
skull flag is just cool ok, doesn't mean anything (Score:1)
"since day 1 we have stood against piracy" says the pirate the stole the entire catalogue of western music and put it up basically for free
"against piracy" says the wall someone put up between a musician and his money
I feel like "open-source group" is misused, here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Say what you will about whether this is justified or not, but calling this an "open-source group" is a disservice. Open-source advocates will happily go on for hours about the problems caused by closed-source software, but almost never encourage violating IP, because open-source software itself relies on vigorous IP protections.
Translation... (Score:2)
They are saying that they changed the locks on the doors through which they got robbed of their robbed articles. That's common sense I thought.