I feel like Ek receives a disproportional amount of hate for this. You have all these American CEO's pouring their investments in the American war machine (Palantir, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc) and no one bats an eye.

Is it because this time it's going to a European company?

No, it's because Spotify is a consumer facing brand that people interact with daily and are aware of even if they don't use it. Also they're notorious for not paying artists well.

'LM are worse' is really not the strong vote of support you think it is.

More than two things can be utterly disgusting at the very same time!

How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.

I would guess this can be hidden under normal music streaming activity? But one would need lots of proxies!

It's hard to imagine anything but physical egress for that kind of volume.

50 free accounts continually streaming music rack up 20 TB in a month. So that would take about 1.5 years. Our you use 750 accounts and do it in a month.

I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.

That’s if they pretend to stream the music. If they are using throwaway free accounts I imagine they can download the DRM-stripped files much more quickly.

True, but I could see them rate limiting that much more aggressively than streaming.

You can download playlists for offline use, it'll go pretty fast. I doubt they monitor it that hard.

You can probably just buy a thousand hacked spotify accounts for not much more than $1 a piece

Rent a dedicated server, setup mullvad wireguard on it or whatever. Download stuff to said server using wireguard.

Sure, you can also use Tor. The people engaged in copyright-related illegality generally don't.

But then you need to rent a server without leaving any hint on your real identity. Which means going to some dodgy corners of the internet.

I certainly wouldn't attempt

Depends on your threat model, you'd probably have to be scraping at a pretty large scale for anyone to try pursuing you through vpn providers.

This is unquestionably a large scale.

Perhaps they leased a botnet. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/10/aisuru-botnet-shifts-fro...

I mean 300TB is nothing for a streaming service, like it woudn't even show on a dashboard. They probably did that over weeks which is invisible.