A pirate activist group has reportedly scraped and released metadata from Spotify, and intends to release 86 million audio files.
  • FoxyFerengi@startrek.websiteEnglish
    120·
    1 month ago

    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.

    Lmao. They protect and defend artist rights so hard they they’ve refused to pay a fair compensation, and have taken it further by promoting AI artists over actual artists. This statement is almost comical after it was reported that they’ve had copy cats to replace King Glizard and the Lizard Wizard when they pulled their albums from Spotify

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    731·
    1 month ago

    I’m sure it’s been scraped plenty of times by AI companies who are doing way more damage.

  • gointhefridge@lemmy.zipEnglish
    354·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • littleomid@feddit.orgEnglish
      13·
      1 month ago

      As a former professional, now semi professional musician: we make our money playing gigs and selling merchandise, not by getting paid by Spotify. Go ahead, pirate all you want. But also go to shows, buy merch, if the bands are on bandcamp, buy their shit.

      • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Random idea: do you think a platform for crowd sourcing / funding ideas could go well for musicians? Like a feature request in software, where users can like a post about a feature to show interest, except it would use dollars instead of likes. Fans could publish an idea for a song they like and donate $5 or whatever. If it’s a popular idea, more people donate to it and the artist takes notice (having now been somewhat paid to produce it).

    • mrdown@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      1 month ago

      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

    • nightlily@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      And it’s probably training gen AI models as we speak to put music artists out of what little profitable work there is left. Very few people value music as much as they do visual art.

  • A_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
    262·
    1 month ago

    These millions of audio files have done nothing wrong. Keeping them locked away is scandalous. Release them immediately !
    /dad joke, sorry

  • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 month ago

    Just remember to try really hard to not to seed it and say it’s training data… And it’s fair use.

  • ramenshaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    I used some software to download music from them and they locked me out of my account for violating their ToS.

  • Samantha Xavia@break3.social
    2·
    1 month ago

    Spotify saying they are here for artists well actively scraping there content to create AI Slop is kinda stupid.

    Well I want artists to be paid spotify often doesn’t pay them fairly it’s one of the reasons I personally try to pay for a direct copy of the music I listen to, to own and use the MP3 in whatever way I see fit (for personal use).