Backing up Spotify

An initiative was undertaken to create the largest, truly open preservation archive for music by backing up Spotify's metadata and music files, resulting in a distribution of approximately 300TB across bulk torrents. This release features the world's largest publicly accessible music metadata database, cataloging 256 million tracks and 186 million unique International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs).

The project addresses limitations in existing preservation efforts, such as over-focusing on popular content and excessive file quality demands. Archival prioritized tracks based on Spotify's popularity metric; the 86 million archived music files represent about 99.6% of total listens. Tracks with higher popularity are in the original 160kbit/s OGG Vorbis format, while lower-priority tracks were re-encoded to 75kbit/s OGG Opus.

The released data is structured into various SQLite databases containing track, artist, and album information, along with associated audio features, playlist data, and file mappings. This comprehensive collection aims to protect humanity’s musical heritage against loss and offers tools for data exploration, including generating a "true shuffle" across the entire dataset.