I’m sure it’s been scraped plenty of times by AI companies who are doing way more damage.
I’m an artist with music on Spotify. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.
I know Metallica got a lot of shit about Napster back in the day, but I can’t help but feel like they were right. They were (by my recollection) trying to ensure artists still have a claim to their body of work. I know the industry has come so far since then, but it feels like the moment everything started to slowly become “content” and not art.
I just want real people to actually enjoy my music. I don’t expect to make a living or even real money off my music, but I also don’t like someone else making money off my art and using it to train AI models.
I made something meaningful, no one else gets to decide that they wanna commodify it or use it to make slop.
Anything you post online should be considered permanently online. It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online. The way I think about it is that anything I put online is for everyone, good or bad, and not for profit.
I think that was op of the top comment here said - that they post it for everyone, without expecting a profit, for people to enjoy. But scummy actors are using their art to gain profit in immoral methods.
To bring the 2 points together - once something is online(fully agree with what you said) bad actors will inevitably use it to gain profit and commoditize it.
People are able to download your music illegally if they aware you exists and ai companies was also able to train models before the scrape
I get why this feels personal, but I think there’s a deeper problem with the framing. The internet was never meant to be anyone’s marketplace. It was meant to be a place for people to share ideas and work freely, not a storefront.
The moment we decided the internet should function like a sales platform, artificial scarcity became inevitable. That’s when art turned into “content,” and creativity got optimized for algorithms instead of people. Freedom and monetization can’t really coexist online the business model always wins.
deleted by creator
I don’t think it was a good idea to upload it to Spotify then.
For the record, I support piracy and don’t mind that people listen to my music for free. I don’t like other companies making money off it though. They didn’t make it, they don’t get to use it to make money.
Its not so much the money I’m not making, it’s the theft of hard work artists put in and corporations profit off of that makes me upset.
In 2019 the only way to reach people was Spotify. It’s still kinda the biggest game in town. It’s slowly changing but the business and ideas of digital ownership of rights were different 7 years ago.
Oh my God 2019 is almost 7 years ago. That’s insane.
Anyway, my point was ever since you uploaded it, it has been on the Internet for anyone to grab. Even before this, anyone competent enough to train an AI or host a competing music service would have been able to download it in the same way that these people did. The only difference is that now there’s a copy being preserved that’s not under the control of an evil corporation.
You have the right to feel any way you want about that, and you’re entirely justified in being uncomfortable with how carelessly it may seem your hard work is being spread around and copied, but personally I think it’s a good thing with very little drawback since it just makes it easier to do something that was already well within the abilities of the entities you’re worried about.
These millions of audio files have done nothing wrong. Keeping them locked away is scandalous. Release them immediately !
/dad joke, sorryI dare to wage that the top 1000 most popular artists entire body of work is already freely available in torrent form. The remainder of artists will benefit from an independent archival point of view.
Spotify absolutely deserves to be singled out for its exploitative practices, especially since this company is largely responsible for musicians not being paid fairly for their hard work. It’s just a shame that there’s hardly anything to steal here other than people’s hard work, to which Spotify has contributed nothing - but that applies to all companies that are successful on the internet today. Without exception, all of these companies are built on the same platform logic: the content that these companies exploit is paid for with starvation wages, if at all (not at all in the case of LLMs).
Therefore, I cannot see anything positive in this because it does not change the underlying problem in the slightest.
The major labels are still the biggest evil
Spotify & Co. make advance payments to the labels to be allowed to use their music catalogues. These advance payments are then recouped with the streaming revenues. However, if the revenue is less than the advance, the difference remains with the labels as “breakage”. If a streaming service pays a label US $1 million as an advance for the contract period, but the label’s catalogue is only streamed to the value of US $750,000, then the label has US $250,000 in additional revenue that does not have to be distributed to the artists.
Nevertheless, Spotify makes more profit than any music label, even more than all the remaining music labels combined. This is how it works today: music, literature, journalism, and art no longer exist according to this logic - only content. And as disrespectful as the term sounds, that’s how it’s paid for - with scrabs because that’s the business model.
Your pirate approach is no longer up to date, because it is no longer directed against large corporations, but robs artists of the little they have left. This will only accelerate the trend: no one will try to make a living from art anymore. If you think that people will do it anyway because they want to express themselves, I think you are absolutely wrong.
It makes more profits but not revenus
Market cap and profits are different metrics. At the end of the day major labels dictate streaming services policies . Considering that they own 80% of all music
It’s not accelerating the trend one bit by opening it to everyone. Music labels and Spotify don’t plan on putting a stop to AI, they want to own it. The artists lost decades ago and siding with copyright juggernauts doesn’t help anyone but the copyright juggernauts.
Just remember to try really hard to not to seed it and say it’s training data… And it’s fair use.
Lars Ulrich is raging,he’s gonna sue.
I used some software to download music from them and they locked me out of my account for violating their ToS.
Eww, why scrape that cesspool of AI generated slop?
Because before the AI slop there was real content that was only ever released to Spotify.
