Preservation or Piracy? The Scraping of All of Spotify - DTNS 5170

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 22, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and try to help each other understand. Today, a preservationist group scrapes a huge amount of Spotify's metadata and more than a third of its music files. Is it piracy, though? Piracy, they say. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. so a post on an open source search engine anna's archive notes that the preservationist group behind anna's archive found a way to scrape metadata and music files at scale from spotify and is making them available as torrents anna's archive says that it normally focuses on preserving text.

0:51You may have run across them where they have open sourced books that maybe authors did not want to be made open source. But it says that music is fairly well preserved, so it hasn't gone after music as much. However, when they figured out that they could do this at scale, they realized that they could take this action to preserve a long tail of less popular artists, preserve at smaller file sizes, since most people who preserve their own music do it at high bit rates, high quality, you know, flax, that kind of thing. And also contribute to the creation of an authoritative list that could represent metadata for all music ever produced, something that they've made progress towards with text, but doesn't really exist for music.

1:38Anna's Archive believes it has obtained metadata for 99.9 % of Spotify tracks and accessed about 37 % of the music files on Spotify, but they focused on the most popular, so they think it represents 99.6 % of Spotify listens. The files are in Spotify's 160 kilobit per second Ogg Vorbis format. They're unaltered. Anna's archive metadata includes 186 million unique recordings using ISRC, the International Standard Recording Code, to sort of de-dupe. Sometimes you'll have different versions, remixes, and something that are under one ISRC. So they have more metadata recordings than 186 million, but they think they've got 186 million unique recordings.

2:25One of the biggest databases of tracks, Music Brains, only has 5 million ISRCs by comparison. So it's a big jump in the number of recordings that are documented. The torrent of the metadata has been released, and they do plan to release torrents of the music files themselves, which would estimate at about 300 terabytes as one file, or one torrent rather, followed by additional file metadata like checksums, then a separate torrent for just album art, and a.cst patch file for preservationist reconstruction. There's no plan yet for making music files available individually, though Anna's Archive said that if enough people ask for it, they might consider it.

3:09Spotify believes Anna's Archive scraped the metadata from public sources, so they didn't circumvent anything. They just scraped Spotify somehow without having to do any circumvention. However, they did circumvent DRM to access the audio files, which would be a violation of laws. Spotify says it has identified and disabled the quote-unquote nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping and has added new safeguards to stop this from happening in the future. Now, Rob, the cry is piracy from one side. The cry is preservation from the other. Where does your inclination lie? It depends on if you work for a company like Spotify or Disney or anyone who has massive amounts of copyright that they protect vigorously.

4:00And folks who like to go to libraries and just here's the stuff that has existed in history and here's an archive of it. It really depends on which side of the fence you fall on. Spotify is one of the apps to say that this is pirated content because that serves their purpose to do so. They want you to pay to get access to this. but I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, but I do think this is probably going to go to the courts. Maybe, yeah. If they can get identities for people, you're probably right. I look at this and I think that most of what Anna's archive is saying is defensible, which is, especially the metadata, having a historical record that could say like, hey, here's a list of everything ever recorded that's been out there is becoming more and more difficult because of the number of recordings being made.

4:53So I think they did a fairly good faith effort to do that part of this. Now, could they have gone about this in a way that included cooperation from Spotify? Of course, they're gonna argue that Spotify wouldn't have cooperated, that Spotify wouldn't have talked to them. And Anna's Archive is probably not gonna be the company that Spotify or the organization that Spotify is gonna go to. given their history, right? So this is definitely an activist group. But I think there's a lot more defensible reasons for them doing this. Some of them legal, some of them not legal, but just morally defensible.

5:28When you get to the music, the argument for piracy here is that Spotify is like, well, you are undermining the need for our service because if you could take all 300 terabytes, You could recreate Spotify on your own and operate it. That would definitely get you in legal trouble if you tried to do that. But maybe somebody just wants to do it in their own house. The thing is, I still find those arguments to be a little fallacious because if I do that, I have to also keep adding all the new tracks that are being created all the time. Right. Like that most people go to Spotify. In fact, Anna's Archive's own data showed that most people stream 0.1 % of the things on Spotify because they're always streaming the newest stuff.

6:13The value of Spotify isn't necessarily in having the files. The value of Spotify is having an easy way at a low price to access whatever music you want to hear, especially new music as it's released. So I don't know that this actually undermines Spotify's business in reality. You might play a lawyer.

6:37just to be clear i'm not arguing that that this is legal in any sense right i don't think it is uh but but should spotify be actually worried i you know i don't know and that that gets to the arguments about why we have copyright law be so definitive for such a long time and all of that so one you know correct me if i'm wrong on this but one of the tenets of of holding copyright is that you need to protect it vigorously if you think it is being no that's trademark people yeah people uh often say that about trademark because you you do have to show that you're using the trademark or it could fall into disuse and someone could go to court and try to prove that you you weren't using it anymore so why should you have the trademark but even then you still could could win in court uh copyright's fixed you you don't have to do anything once you have copyright It's yours.

7:26For the term, anyway. Thank you for the clarification there. So like I said, I get why they're doing it. And I actually believe their intention to, we just want to preserve this so that sometime in 100 years, 200, 300 years from now, people can go back and look and see what was this giant service, Spotify, and what music existed on it. I absolutely believe that. I also absolutely believe that Spotify is like, we plan on being here in 200 or 300 years. So if you want access, you could pay us$47 ,000 a month because that's probably what the membership would cost, you know, 300, 400 years in the future.

8:08Just pay us that. You could get access to this. You don't have to go through a third party archive to get access to what we have. Yeah. I think it's just important because every headline you're going to see is going to talk about piracy. And I think we'll all be very clear on Spotify's position on this, right? They are not going to want it to be allowed. And like you said, they're going to pursue legal means, I would guess. uh but i i think there's more to the anna's archive argument than meets the eye or we'll get a lot of discussion uh granted i think there's also probably part of anna's archives organization that's like yeah but also stick it to the man etc etc like that's part of it too there could be some of that um but i don't see this as piracy i don't but once again it's like i i don't even you know try to defend laws and stuff like that so we both see it as legal piracy I think that's clear, whether it's spiritual piracy or not, right?

9:04Yeah, that's a whole different conversation. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Paul Boyer, D-Laser, Brad, and our new patrons, Ziv and Senor Horskuri Dad. We've also got raises from Martin, Jeff, and Roland. And welcome back to the family, Kevin. All right. Good patron, Browns.

9:26There is more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. It looks like foldable phones may move to a square, more passport style look, similar to the original Pixel Fold from 2023. ET News sources say Apple is considering a 4.3 aspect ratio for its foldable, which would match the iPad. And Samsung is developing a wide fold with a 4.3 aspect ratio as well. They both are more square than the Pixel Fold, which has a 6.5 aspect ratio. Samsung is supposedly testing a 7.6-inch inner panel, while Apple's panel is 7.58 inches. Yeah, I have the original Pixel Fold, and I liked that it had that more square squat look to it.

10:08Granted, 4.3 is going to be even more square than 6.5. But I understand why Google changed it in the newer folds, because apps just don't always render well in that tablet-style format. uh so every once in a while i have something that just doesn't quite work in that format and i have to close it up and and use it on the front page but uh i i do think more development is taking place that way so you can you can definitely see samsung realizing that they can have more apps work better in that format uh and that format works better as a tablet than the than the more oblong style that we've had uh apple i think that's that's dead simple they have an ipad they've got apps or the iPad.

10:52And when you open up a foldable, you can use it as an iPad, you know, dead simple. Yeah. You want it to be that aspect ratio. Makes perfect sense for the iPad. And this is, this is Samsung saying, huh, you know, the iPad is pretty, pretty popular. We do okay with our tablets, but okay for Samsung is a rounding error compared to Apple. So they, they say, well, if you make these things look a little more like an iPad, maybe we can convince more people to buy them. Because one of the other things is that, you know, one of the nice things about all this real estate on these foldable phones is that you can consume media and just have more screen.

11:27But when they are candy bar style foldables, like if you think of like the Samsung, you know, the Z Fold, when you open that thing up and then you watch a video on it, you have black bars, you know, significantly large black bars that stop in the bottom because it just doesn't have the right aspect ratio when you open it up. So when you get a little bit more square, that should go away and just looking at content should look a little bit better on it. like you're looking at like an iPad mini. And with my original Pixel Fold, I admit when it's closed up and I'm using it just like a regular phone, it does feel a little small because of that aspect ratio.

12:00But if it ever feels too small, I just unfold it. You know, I'm like, there's a built-in solution to that problem. So I don't think that's a big deal. If it feels small, take a look at the Samsung Z Fold, Tri Fold. Oh yeah, right. It opens up to a 10-inch tablet being gloriously large. Yeah, you got options. Extravagantly expensive, but it's really big. So there is at least an option there as well. That's going to be the big thing with foldables. And I wonder if the RAM crisis delays us getting more reasonable prices on foldables. But they do need them to get to scale so they can start to drop that price because it's a bit of a head-eating-its-tail sort of situation.

12:42It's too expensive for people to adopt, but they can't get the price down until more people adopt it. Exactly. The screen looks beautiful, though. I mean, a 10-inch phone that you can put in your pocket when you open it up out of your pocket. It is pretty beautiful looking. So I would be a fan. I don't know if I'd be willing to pay for it, though. We got a lot of friends up in San Francisco, including Molly Wood, was texting me this weekend about the power outage, but more about the Waymos that were stopped in the middle of the streets. Northern California's Pacific Gas and Electric suffered a power outage in San Francisco Saturday due to a fire in a substation.

13:20Big outage. Outage affected more than 130 ,000 customers. And as far as this technology story goes, also affected city traffic lights widespread. Now, when you and I come to a traffic light that's out, we are supposed to treat it as a four-way stop. Waymo vehicles in the city, however, began just coming to a stop in the middle of the road, not because of the power outage, but because of the number of stoplight outages. Waymo vehicles also treat dark stoplights as a four-way stop, as you and I would. But Waymo said, and I quote, vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of affected intersections.

13:59Because of the number of stopped Waymos, the company actually paused its Waymo service on Saturday evening and resumed it on Sunday afternoon. I have a feeling it has also probably to do with connectivity because a lot of cell phone towers were not getting power. So it was taking longer for them to figure out what was going on when they reached those stops. I think people were probably behaving a little differently than they would at a single stoplight that was out because there's a little bit of a panic of like, oh my gosh, all the stoplights are out. So Waymo's probably having a harder time reacting to that.

14:33I don't think we'll get it, but I'd be curious if Waymo would put out a comprehensive analysis of why their vehicles were acting this way when they normally wouldn't if it was just one four-way stop that was out. This is one of those things to where I would imagine that someone at Waymo has thought about what happens if this happens. And they run it through some scenarios, but they just didn't have enough data points to actually really figure out what happens. because how often do you have power outages that affect stoplights across an entire city? It's, you know, it happens. I mean, you know, we hear about these things every year, but from a Waymo standpoint, how do they test against that?

15:12And then how do they test against how people are going to react against it? Maybe they're getting some metrics from this. I would imagine that they are. They're going to be able to put this into their models going forward and make it a little bit better. But it really is an interesting experiment of what happens if all the lights go out? What happens if you can't connect back to your, you know, to your base station because there's no cellular right now? What do these cars do that don't actually have a person in them thinking for you? They, you know, it is an AI and they try to run every scenario that they can.

15:43This is probably one that they probably thought about it, but they just didn't know what the ramifications would be if it were to actually happen. And that's why we see stop wavemoles all over the road. No, that's a really good point. They definitely do simulate these kinds of things because they know they're going to happen. So I see some criticisms of Waymo should have planned for eventual power outages. I think they did. Like you said, I think there's something about this power outage that wasn't in their simulations. Either they didn't have the widespread internet outage. Maybe they didn't have the widespread four-way stops because four-way stops often are powered independently from the grid by solar.

16:23Maybe they overestimated how many of those were. Maybe they didn't know how many of those were. But that's why I'd like a report from Waymo to be like, ah, the reason our simulations didn't account for this in the future was this was the aspect of the reality that happened. I don't blame any company for not anticipating every segment of reality, but I'm curious, you know, what was the quirk here? You know, what was the thing that didn't get planned for? Claire Obscura Expedition 33 not only won Game of the Year at the Game Awards, but also won at the Indie Game Awards. However, the Indie Game Awards have a prohibition against any nominees using AI tools in the development of its games.

17:02Some generated textures were published at the launch of Claire Obscura, but were patched out five days after release. The rules of the Indie Game Awards state that games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination. However, Sandfall Interactive did not disclose this when it submitted Claire Obscure for a nomination. Indie Game of the Year was awarded to Blueprints. Debut game, which Claire Obscure had also won, was awarded to Sorry, We're Closed. Yeah, it's pretty cut and dried in one respect, which is they say you can't use AI in the development. Claire Obscure may have thought like, well, we had a few textures, but that really wasn't the development.

17:38We weren't using LLMs to do the coding. That's what they mean. and Indie Game Awards was like, no, we mean anything. That's the way we wrote it. So you should have disclosed that. It was publicly known. It was in El Pais over the summer. So somebody could have pointed this out before now, but it wasn't until they won that a bunch of fans pointed it out. We could have a whole other conversation about whether the Indie Game Awards should prohibit that. But I think if you're looking at the rules, these were the rules. And Claire Obscure probably should have disclosed that and then they wouldn't have been nominated.

18:13the rules are the rules. I don't have a problem with the rules. As you said, the bigger conversation and maybe the spicery conversation is what will the Indie Game Awards do going forward? Because I think that we are probably very close to a time to where games simply will not be developed without using artificial intelligence. I just, I think that we are very close to that just will no longer be the case unless it is some, some nice game where the, the, the, the, The goal was let's build a game and use no AI for it. That's not going to be the case for most games that most people are playing. Yeah, I think the Indie Game Awards rules are going to be reviewed because of this.

18:50Because there will be a lot of people saying, yeah, okay, so they technically violated the rules. But that's not what we were mad about. We just didn't want people creating an entire game out of AI and then trying to win an award. That's not what Claire Obscure did. uh so i bet they change the rules and they will change the rules in a way that reflects the opinions of indie game fans right so it'll it'll you'll be able to tell where where the general sentiment amongst indie game fans on this uh sits based on how they change the rules and i'm guessing if i had to guess that they will have some sort of like the predominance of the development or you know be you know nothing released can have been created because i think that's what Claire Obscure was saying is, yeah, we patched it out.

19:34So there's nothing in that game that was created by AI. We did use it as placeholders along the way. And we think that's okay. Yeah. Placeholders. Like we were trying to get our development done. We did this because it's quick to do, knowing that we were going to swap it out five days after the gamers release. We knew we were going to do this. But I think you're going to see more and more games that are going to start being developed using AI. So those rules are going to have to be modified, at least to some extent based off of what the public say they want. Finally, some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future.

20:10Reuters reports that NVIDIA has told its Chinese customers that it will resume shipping H200 chips, the second most powerful chips by the Lunar New Year, which begins February 17th. Paramount is trying to appeal to shareholders to accept its bid for Warner Brothers instead of Netflix's to that end. It did not increase its offer, But it amended it to include an irrevocable personal guarantee from Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, for close to 40 % of the financing. This is an attempt to allay doubts about Ellison's involvement and the security of the Paramount Bids debt. Interesting. Very, very interesting.

20:50Instacart said it will end its test that let retailers test charging different customers different prices for the same items. Gee, thank you, Instacart. People don't like that. Turns out the test showed. Baidu will begin offering autonomous Apollo Go RT6 taxi rides in London through Uber in the first half of 2026 and also through Lyft pending regulatory approval. Alphabet has agreed to buy solar and wind energy developer Intertech Power in order to secure energy for operating Google data centers. Yeah, this was top of the charts on some places like TechMeme, but Alphabet already was a majority owner.

21:26So to me, it's like, yeah, they just bought the rest of it. There we go. Chinese large language model companies, Mimimax and Shippoo AI have filed their business models publicly in advance of an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And I threw this in here because I'm like, haven't heard of these names. A lot of buzz around them. Some names to kind of put in the old head to think about later. blackberry raised the lower end of its 2026 revenue forecast thanks to strong demand for cyber security software estimating 531 million dollars instead of 519 million as the lowest revenue in the fiscal year i mean we put this in the show just because we wanted to hear rob read about a blackberry story i know and i'm just sitting here it's like it's not in my stomach 531 million dollars is not an insignificant number but you know what is not 1.9 trillion that's where they should be per quarter if they would have just done what they needed to do uh google said it will not end up finishing its plan to replace google assistant with gemini on all android devices by the end of the year but it should finish it in early 2026 they'll update us more in a few months valve discontinued its less expensive 399 stream deck with an lcd screen leaving only the$549 OLED model.

22:43And Threads keeps trying to appeal to podcasters, putting in a feature that will let you upload a snippet of your show to play as a podcast preview in a Thread post. Threads is being very, very friendly to podcasters over the last few months, so I definitely will be checking this one out. Folks, if any of you are headed to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you should meet up with us. Me and Rob are going to be there. Amos, KT Data are going to be there. If you're around, you don't even have to be at CES. If you're just in Las Vegas, Wednesday, January 7th at 6.30 p.m., meet us at the Resorts World Food Court.

23:15Very informal. We're just going to meet up. There's places you can go to grab some food and drink if you want. We'll have some stickers to give away. We'll just sit down, talk tech. So come on and join us Wednesday, January 7th, 6.30 p.m. at the Resorts World Food Court. See you there.

23:34we end every episode of dt nestles from shared wisdom and shared perspectives today andrew pointed out an odd coincidence in the wake of the uk's new age verification laws for adult content yeah andrew was like uh i noticed on english premier league matches on nbc all the pitch advertising boards showed an express vpn ad huh i wonder why they are a tottenham team sponsor but it could be, could it be a new law in the UK that has increased their presence? Certainly didn't decrease it, Andrew. That's what I'll say. No, I just think people really just want to protect their data and use VPNs and be, you know, like the people who are going to coffee shops and using public Wi-Fi has gone up.

24:20So they want to use a VPN just to be secure. And HTTPS is most everywhere, but not absolutely everywhere. So, you know, you just want to be careful. Well, folks, we want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insight into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. All right. Before we finish up today, we do want to take a moment to acknowledge the death of our friend Lamar Wilson, which we learned about, or Rob and I both learned about on Friday, but apparently happened November 21st. Lamar was a good friend of mine. I hung out with him a lot.

24:57He lived in the same neighborhood as me. and I am incredibly sad about what happened and I'm going to miss him. And I know he was a good friend of you too, Rob, like you were getting, just getting to know him over the past few years. Yeah. So, you know, Lamar and I, we, we've known of each other for years because we've been in, you know, in this business for a long time. I think at some point, probably well before the pandemic we were on the same show and that's where we initially met. But during the pandemic, You know, back in, actually, I think it was March or April of 2020, we were, you know, we did something together and we just kind of clicked.

25:32It's like, you know, you're a cool guy. It's like, yeah, I think you're a cool guy, too. And we just became, you know, really good friends. Lamar and I probably had conversations, you know, every month or so for like the last five years. So, you know, you and I were kind of wondering, like, hey, have you ever heard from Lamar lately? He's been, you know, been kind of silent. So, you know, we didn't know what happened until we just found out this past Friday. But I can just tell you, I remember the last time I talked with him and I just I did not know the last time I talked to my friend would be the last time that I talked to my friend.

26:02Yeah. And, you know, we shouldn't obfuscate the fact that it was ruled a suicide. So it's important that even if things don't seem off with friends, to be there for them, check in on them. There's more now than ever, all kinds of good resources for helping with that. If you're feeling something like that yourself, don't be afraid to talk to folks about it. And I say that knowing that, like, you know, if you're in that state of mind, you don't want to talk to folks about it. And there's only so much you can do. But encouraging folks to be honest and being open to folks being honest with you is really important.

26:43Yeah. And, you know, when you have the opportunity to check in on somebody, if you're thinking about somebody, check in on them. You never know what that check in may do. Yeah. Anyway, Lamar, you will be missed, my friend. sure will all right big thanks to andrew for contributing to today's show thank you for being along for daily tech news show you folks keep us in business thanks for being patrons check in on each other okay

27:20the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.