Backing Up Spotify
a day ago
- #spotify-archive
- #music-preservation
- #open-data
- Anna’s Archive backed up Spotify metadata and music files, creating the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
- The archive includes 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens, and is the first fully open 'preservation archive' for music.
- Music preservation efforts often focus on popular artists and high-quality files, but this archive addresses gaps by including less popular tracks and optimizing file sizes.
- The archive prioritizes tracks based on Spotify’s popularity metric, with different audio quality for popular (OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s) and less popular tracks (OGG Opus at 75kbit/s).
- The data is released in stages, starting with metadata, followed by music files, additional metadata, album art, and patch files.
- The archive aims to protect humanity’s musical heritage from natural disasters, wars, and other catastrophes, and encourages donations and seeding of torrents.
- High-level statistics reveal that 70% of songs on Spotify have fewer than 1000 streams, with most listens coming from a small fraction of popular tracks.
- The archive’s metadata is stored in SQLite databases, and music files are distributed in the Anna’s Archive Containers (AAC) format, with added metadata.
- The archive also includes audio features, playlists, and other data, providing a comprehensive resource for music preservation and research.