A pirate activist group has reportedly scraped and released metadata from Spotify, and intends to release 86 million audio files.
    • bluesheep@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      A lot of it probably.

      They have a breakdown of the data on their blog. If you scroll down to album releases by date, you can see a very sharp uptick in releases, with around ~2 million albums in 2019 to ~11 million albums in 2024.

      They even make a comment on it likely being inflated by AI:

      If we group albums by release year, we see that more and more new music is added to Spotify, a lot of it likely automatically generated: […] The amount of procedurally and AI generated content makes it hard to find what is actually valuable.

      • TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        1 month ago

        You should watch this video:

        The dark side of Spotify from Slightly Sociable.

        It’s about short AI music created for phone farms to steal royalties away from real artists. It’s a whole business model and Spotify encourages this malicious practice as all those phones use premium to earn money faster, and 33% of that money goes to Spotify. Plus they do other illegal stuff like promote music from stake holder companies over other music.

          • TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            4·
            1 month ago

            What’s even more depressing is that there isn’t a proper alternative. Many music streaming services have their own flaws. A friend of mine recommended Deezer, as it has really high quality streams but that one is owned by a Russian oligarch.

            Artists are paid the most with Apple music but Apple is a shit company as well. Streaming is all fucked, same with movies / shows.

            If you want to support the artists, buy their music on Bandcamp. Musicians are having it hard, they need our support. They deserve our money. It’s the pirate code: pirate from the mega corps and billionaires, support the little guys.