1. Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.

• We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
• For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
• For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn’t the focus be on getting the least popular music first?

This is the one thing on Spotify I can’t get elsewhere. Would be nice to have a non transcode copy.

https://open.spotify.com/album/4emoC6C9fCDkWPdTuxN9an

…Like Cologne (Spotify Exclusive)
Queens of the Stone Age
2013 • 3 songs • 14 min 5 sec

There’s definitely gonna be some crazy guy who will put this on their server and stream it to their phones lol