Stephen Downes

This is as remarkable as it is illegal. Anna's Archive reports that "We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It's distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It's the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens." It's represents part of their effort to catalogue and preserve all music, and though Spotify doesn't quite have that, "it's a good start". It's also notable that over the last few years it has become impossible to say how much music is being produced because "the amount of procedurally and AI generated content makes it hard to find what is actually valuable." So this might be the best, last and only comprehensive collection of human-authored music. See also: Billboard.