As far as Anna's Archive and other shadow libraries go, legality (in terms of copyright law / etc) is not really a prime concern of theirs anyway, and I personally respect them for that in certain...
As far as Anna's Archive and other shadow libraries go, legality (in terms of copyright law / etc) is not really a prime concern of theirs anyway, and I personally respect them for that in certain ways.
However, I do think that given the music industry's aggressive history in the legal realm, this could be putting a much bigger spotlight on themselves than desired which could damage their other efforts, so I'm not sure it's a good decision for their organization regardless
I'm not sure of their state of resiliency compared to other shadow libraries like SciHub etc,, but maybe they've already carefully considered this and have taken whatever efforts are necessary to conceal themselves or reside in a location to make getting at them more difficult
Some of you may have seem this around, but I wanted to post this here to get your thoughts: There are several data visualizations on the blog page. The project seems audacious and questionably...
Some of you may have seem this around, but I wanted to post this here to get your thoughts:
We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity.
This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
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.
There are several data visualizations on the blog page. The project seems audacious and questionably legal. What do you think?
Everything Anna's Archive does isn't just "questionably legal," it's considered wildly illegal and governments treat them similarly to organized crime. Which is exactly why Anna's Archive is...
Everything Anna's Archive does isn't just "questionably legal," it's considered wildly illegal and governments treat them similarly to organized crime.
Which is exactly why Anna's Archive is necessary. Many have said that the digital era will be a bigger black hole of lost media than any other time since recording technology was developed, because things are disappeared when they no longer make enough money.
It's kinda weird how people are not nearly as angry about this sort of thing as they are about, say, AI companies. Spotify doesn't pay much in royalties, but Anna's Archive pays nothing. Isn't...
It's kinda weird how people are not nearly as angry about this sort of thing as they are about, say, AI companies. Spotify doesn't pay much in royalties, but Anna's Archive pays nothing. Isn't that worse?
It’s because the end result is so different. Projects like Anna’s library are for prevention and are still giving credit to the creators, just not monetarily. Where as AI is hoovering up real...
It’s because the end result is so different. Projects like Anna’s library are for prevention and are still giving credit to the creators, just not monetarily. Where as AI is hoovering up real creative projects to churn out slop, while the creators that were used to train it get no credit.
Anna's Archive are also taking from the relatively few (creators) to give to the many (society in general), rather than taking from the relatively few (creators) to give to the even fewer (tech...
Anna's Archive are also taking from the relatively few (creators) to give to the many (society in general), rather than taking from the relatively few (creators) to give to the even fewer (tech company shareholders). Most people approach these kind of questions with a pretty robust internal sense of fairness, even if they don't always stop to explicitly question it beyond gut feeling.
I'd expect a similarly different reaction to stealing from Walmart to supply community kitchens, vs stealing from Walmart to supply McDonald's franchises. And probably a somewhat similar outcome too, actually: the McDonald's franchises getting free food would use that edge to boost profits and/or undercut competition and capture more of the market. If the community kitchen gets free food, the people eat the food and get to save some money. Both options risk disrupting the wider supply chain if Walmart packs up and leaves because they're now losing money - it's a genuine risk that could feasibly lead to people being worse off in either scenario - but one leaves a community organisation in place to face that issue, the other leaves a McDonald's monopoly.
That analogy... kinda got away from me, but I actually quite like it. It's in no way disingenuous to say that the status quo kinda sucked, and that the path we're on now looks even worse, and that it's justifiable to use the same tactics in the community interest, since that stability has already been disrupted, regardless of whether or not you believe that maintaining the status quo would have been preferable otherwise.
But then I was on the "training is fair use, but we need massive copyright reform" side of things from the start...
I’m not convinced that one can attribute much actual harm to Anna’s Archive. I doubt many people will use this for their music instead of a service like Spotify. Pirates could sail the high seas...
I’m not convinced that one can attribute much actual harm to Anna’s Archive. I doubt many people will use this for their music instead of a service like Spotify. Pirates could sail the high seas with other sources before, and non-pirates (like me) likely won’t switch off existing platforms in response. Perhaps my unsubstantiated prior is wrong; we’ll see if Spotify has a massive drop in subscribing users.
If Spotify loses no users, why spend money trying to stop this?
First, they have a reputation to uphold in the public eye. Second, they don’t want anyone getting the idea of making it easier to access pirated content. Third, I believe Spotify still has to attempt some retaliatory action to provide a legal basis for potential future damages awarded in court. If they don’t try to fight this now, lawyers may argue in the future that the lack of action shows Spotify was not being materially harmed by the piracy.
I think the only material change of this event is that it is easier to archive a bunch of songs that previously were not archived because nobody cared that much. I don’t think that’s too bad.
Well, with the discontinuation of the penny here in the US, I have to round to the nearest nickle, and that means that artists have to get zero. It's just simple practical business sense. In all...
Well, with the discontinuation of the penny here in the US, I have to round to the nearest nickle, and that means that artists have to get zero. It's just simple practical business sense.
In all seriousness, though, If artists are barely getting paid for my streams, why should I care if that doesn't get to them at all? If there's an artist I really care about, I'd actually buy their music so that they get a more reasonable cut, or if possible (it often isn't), I'd go to a concert and buy merch.
Beyond that, why does it make a difference if Anna's Archive has this when chances are that all of this music is available elsewhere already - possibly in higher quality, even? If anything, it's a good thing that this music is archived.
What profit is Anna's Archive extracting from their efforts? That they aren't taking from the public weal for their own profit makes a big and very obvious difference.
What profit is Anna's Archive extracting from their efforts? That they aren't taking from the public weal for their own profit makes a big and very obvious difference.
On the other hand, they explicitly solicit donations from those wishing to use their catalog to train generative models, so it's not like their preservation efforts are exactly pro-author/-artist....
On the other hand, they explicitly solicit donations from those wishing to use their catalog to train generative models, so it's not like their preservation efforts are exactly pro-author/-artist. From elsewhere on their site:
LLM data
It is well understood that LLMs thrive on high-quality data. We have the largest collection of books, papers, magazines, etc in the world, which are some of the highest quality text sources.
Unique scale and range
Our collection contains over a hundred million files, including academic journals, textbooks, and magazines. We achieve this scale by combining large existing repositories.
Some of our source collections are already available in bulk (Sci-Hub, and parts of Libgen). Other sources we liberated ourselves. Datasets shows a full overview.
Our collection includes millions of books, papers, and magazines from before the e-book era. Large parts of this collection have already been OCR’ed, and already have little internal overlap.
How we can help
We’re able to provide high-speed access to our full collections, as well as to unreleased collections.
This is enterprise-level access that we can provide for donations in the range of tens of thousands USD. We’re also willing to trade this for high-quality collections that we don’t have yet.
We can refund you if you’re able to provide us with enrichment of our data, such as:
OCR
Removing overlap (deduplication)
Text and metadata extraction
Support long-term archival of human knowledge, while getting better data for your model!
No they're taking from the artists well. Stealing 300g of music is not some noble thing. Artists dont need more people trying to figure out how to avoid paying them.
No they're taking from the artists well. Stealing 300g of music is not some noble thing. Artists dont need more people trying to figure out how to avoid paying them.
The sort of people who are most involved with music piracy are the kind of people who are likely giving the most money to musicians. Generally they're huge fans. The barrier to entry is high...
The sort of people who are most involved with music piracy are the kind of people who are likely giving the most money to musicians. Generally they're huge fans. The barrier to entry is high enough to get into music piracy these days that normie music consumers will likely just pay for Spotify or Prime or iTunes or whatever the kids use these days to not own music. The guy deeply involved in private trackers, with a hundred terabytes of storage filled with flacs, also has hundreds of records, t-shirts, and goes to shows monthly.
There are probably some people like that, but how many? If we rephrase this as a neutral question, perhaps something about the spending habits of people who torrent music, how could we even begin...
There are probably some people like that, but how many? If we rephrase this as a neutral question, perhaps something about the spending habits of people who torrent music, how could we even begin to answer it?
Many artists have been pretty open about the fact that they make most of their money from touring and not from people purchasing albums, most of the money from that goes straight to the producer....
Many artists have been pretty open about the fact that they make most of their money from touring and not from people purchasing albums, most of the money from that goes straight to the producer. Radiohead gave Hail to the Theif away for free because of this.
When I was young and poor, $12 an album was way more than I could afford. I pay more than that now when there's a way to give that money directly to the musician, but mostly I still torrent because the best way to access music is still Spotify and hell if they're getting any of my money. I want to own the music I pay for.
And this has always been true. Go back a few decades, and most people overall bought very few records but mostly listened to radio. Radio royalties function similarly to Spotify, but without...
And this has always been true. Go back a few decades, and most people overall bought very few records but mostly listened to radio. Radio royalties function similarly to Spotify, but without precise counting of listenership. (They would use estimates from Nielsen type studies.) There was cachet in being on the radio, and it would sell concerts or get business interested in sync licenses, but it certainly didn't pay. In fact, the label sometimes paid to get the artist on the air...
Mid 20th century musicians often didn't even get royalties of any kind. A label would pay them $50 to record a single and sign over ownership of the copyright. (And said labels still own the rights to this day, because copyright as a concept fucks over culture.)
In the Tin Pan Alley days, people made money on licensing sheet music and player piano rolls. They were quite upset about recording technology reducing the need to hire musicians, who would then buy sheets and pay the ASCAP mafia to perform.
There's nothing really new about music streaming. It's just an evolution of the same frameworks, and the royalty structure is not only similar to existing distribution methods, but is legally set by a panel of federal judges. It just also coincides with a changing market: the amount of music that exists now is vast, due to recording technology being democratized over the past 20 years (I have a laptop that does what The Beatles could only have dreamed of at Abbey Road, for a fraction of the price). And ample supply with finite demand will never create a hot commodity.
It's funny how people are somewhat cognizant that there are few massive acts like the 70s/80s monoculture, and that people listen to a wide variety of things. But they don't connect that to the monetary value coming from that depressing monoculture, since a handful of wealthy tastemakers got to choose who could be a recording artist or not, limiting the supply.
I listened to radio a lot as a kid but soon as I figured out how to own a song so I could play it on repeat for days I switched to doing that. Music isn’t a background noise thing to me like it is...
I listened to radio a lot as a kid but soon as I figured out how to own a song so I could play it on repeat for days I switched to doing that.
Music isn’t a background noise thing to me like it is to most people, it colors my entire reality when its playing. I’m super specific about it.
Most people these days seem to accidentally end up listening to AI generated music and not even notice because it was just background to them. I’ve accepted that my way of consuming music is not like most people.
It's the same thing as any form of piracy: given that it lacks the convenience and frictionlessness of legally distributed media, it will not supercede it. If Spotify loses business from this,...
It's the same thing as any form of piracy: given that it lacks the convenience and frictionlessness of legally distributed media, it will not supercede it. If Spotify loses business from this, it's their own fault.
Anna's Archive prevents this music from disappearing if Spotify ever goes under or pulls some other idiocy that threatens it ; this is ultimately a good thing.
As far as Anna's Archive and other shadow libraries go, legality (in terms of copyright law / etc) is not really a prime concern of theirs anyway, and I personally respect them for that in certain ways.
However, I do think that given the music industry's aggressive history in the legal realm, this could be putting a much bigger spotlight on themselves than desired which could damage their other efforts, so I'm not sure it's a good decision for their organization regardless
I'm not sure of their state of resiliency compared to other shadow libraries like SciHub etc,, but maybe they've already carefully considered this and have taken whatever efforts are necessary to conceal themselves or reside in a location to make getting at them more difficult
Some of you may have seem this around, but I wanted to post this here to get your thoughts:
There are several data visualizations on the blog page. The project seems audacious and questionably legal. What do you think?
Everything Anna's Archive does isn't just "questionably legal," it's considered wildly illegal and governments treat them similarly to organized crime.
Which is exactly why Anna's Archive is necessary. Many have said that the digital era will be a bigger black hole of lost media than any other time since recording technology was developed, because things are disappeared when they no longer make enough money.
It's kinda weird how people are not nearly as angry about this sort of thing as they are about, say, AI companies. Spotify doesn't pay much in royalties, but Anna's Archive pays nothing. Isn't that worse?
It’s because the end result is so different. Projects like Anna’s library are for prevention and are still giving credit to the creators, just not monetarily. Where as AI is hoovering up real creative projects to churn out slop, while the creators that were used to train it get no credit.
Anna's Archive are also taking from the relatively few (creators) to give to the many (society in general), rather than taking from the relatively few (creators) to give to the even fewer (tech company shareholders). Most people approach these kind of questions with a pretty robust internal sense of fairness, even if they don't always stop to explicitly question it beyond gut feeling.
I'd expect a similarly different reaction to stealing from Walmart to supply community kitchens, vs stealing from Walmart to supply McDonald's franchises. And probably a somewhat similar outcome too, actually: the McDonald's franchises getting free food would use that edge to boost profits and/or undercut competition and capture more of the market. If the community kitchen gets free food, the people eat the food and get to save some money. Both options risk disrupting the wider supply chain if Walmart packs up and leaves because they're now losing money - it's a genuine risk that could feasibly lead to people being worse off in either scenario - but one leaves a community organisation in place to face that issue, the other leaves a McDonald's monopoly.
That analogy... kinda got away from me, but I actually quite like it. It's in no way disingenuous to say that the status quo kinda sucked, and that the path we're on now looks even worse, and that it's justifiable to use the same tactics in the community interest, since that stability has already been disrupted, regardless of whether or not you believe that maintaining the status quo would have been preferable otherwise.
But then I was on the "training is fair use, but we need massive copyright reform" side of things from the start...
I’m not convinced that one can attribute much actual harm to Anna’s Archive. I doubt many people will use this for their music instead of a service like Spotify. Pirates could sail the high seas with other sources before, and non-pirates (like me) likely won’t switch off existing platforms in response. Perhaps my unsubstantiated prior is wrong; we’ll see if Spotify has a massive drop in subscribing users.
If Spotify loses no users, why spend money trying to stop this?
First, they have a reputation to uphold in the public eye. Second, they don’t want anyone getting the idea of making it easier to access pirated content. Third, I believe Spotify still has to attempt some retaliatory action to provide a legal basis for potential future damages awarded in court. If they don’t try to fight this now, lawyers may argue in the future that the lack of action shows Spotify was not being materially harmed by the piracy.I think the only material change of this event is that it is easier to archive a bunch of songs that previously were not archived because nobody cared that much. I don’t think that’s too bad.
Well, with the discontinuation of the penny here in the US, I have to round to the nearest nickle, and that means that artists have to get zero. It's just simple practical business sense.
In all seriousness, though, If artists are barely getting paid for my streams, why should I care if that doesn't get to them at all? If there's an artist I really care about, I'd actually buy their music so that they get a more reasonable cut, or if possible (it often isn't), I'd go to a concert and buy merch.
Beyond that, why does it make a difference if Anna's Archive has this when chances are that all of this music is available elsewhere already - possibly in higher quality, even? If anything, it's a good thing that this music is archived.
What profit is Anna's Archive extracting from their efforts? That they aren't taking from the public weal for their own profit makes a big and very obvious difference.
On the other hand, they explicitly solicit donations from those wishing to use their catalog to train generative models, so it's not like their preservation efforts are exactly pro-author/-artist. From elsewhere on their site:
No they're taking from the artists well. Stealing 300g of music is not some noble thing. Artists dont need more people trying to figure out how to avoid paying them.
The sort of people who are most involved with music piracy are the kind of people who are likely giving the most money to musicians. Generally they're huge fans. The barrier to entry is high enough to get into music piracy these days that normie music consumers will likely just pay for Spotify or Prime or iTunes or whatever the kids use these days to not own music. The guy deeply involved in private trackers, with a hundred terabytes of storage filled with flacs, also has hundreds of records, t-shirts, and goes to shows monthly.
There are probably some people like that, but how many? If we rephrase this as a neutral question, perhaps something about the spending habits of people who torrent music, how could we even begin to answer it?
Maybe there are studies out there.
Interesting dissertation done back in 2018 on what.cd (RIP).
Not exactly what you were mentioning but an interesting read nonetheless.
https://scispace.com/pdf/what-cd-a-legacy-of-sharing-sj3ll3tjy8.pdf
Many artists have been pretty open about the fact that they make most of their money from touring and not from people purchasing albums, most of the money from that goes straight to the producer. Radiohead gave Hail to the Theif away for free because of this.
When I was young and poor, $12 an album was way more than I could afford. I pay more than that now when there's a way to give that money directly to the musician, but mostly I still torrent because the best way to access music is still Spotify and hell if they're getting any of my money. I want to own the music I pay for.
And this has always been true. Go back a few decades, and most people overall bought very few records but mostly listened to radio. Radio royalties function similarly to Spotify, but without precise counting of listenership. (They would use estimates from Nielsen type studies.) There was cachet in being on the radio, and it would sell concerts or get business interested in sync licenses, but it certainly didn't pay. In fact, the label sometimes paid to get the artist on the air...
Mid 20th century musicians often didn't even get royalties of any kind. A label would pay them $50 to record a single and sign over ownership of the copyright. (And said labels still own the rights to this day, because copyright as a concept fucks over culture.)
In the Tin Pan Alley days, people made money on licensing sheet music and player piano rolls. They were quite upset about recording technology reducing the need to hire musicians, who would then buy sheets and pay the ASCAP mafia to perform.
There's nothing really new about music streaming. It's just an evolution of the same frameworks, and the royalty structure is not only similar to existing distribution methods, but is legally set by a panel of federal judges. It just also coincides with a changing market: the amount of music that exists now is vast, due to recording technology being democratized over the past 20 years (I have a laptop that does what The Beatles could only have dreamed of at Abbey Road, for a fraction of the price). And ample supply with finite demand will never create a hot commodity.
It's funny how people are somewhat cognizant that there are few massive acts like the 70s/80s monoculture, and that people listen to a wide variety of things. But they don't connect that to the monetary value coming from that depressing monoculture, since a handful of wealthy tastemakers got to choose who could be a recording artist or not, limiting the supply.
I listened to radio a lot as a kid but soon as I figured out how to own a song so I could play it on repeat for days I switched to doing that.
Music isn’t a background noise thing to me like it is to most people, it colors my entire reality when its playing. I’m super specific about it.
Most people these days seem to accidentally end up listening to AI generated music and not even notice because it was just background to them. I’ve accepted that my way of consuming music is not like most people.
It's the same thing as any form of piracy: given that it lacks the convenience and frictionlessness of legally distributed media, it will not supercede it. If Spotify loses business from this, it's their own fault.
Anna's Archive prevents this music from disappearing if Spotify ever goes under or pulls some other idiocy that threatens it ; this is ultimately a good thing.