I wonder if spotify cares about it that much. I looked at the article and it says the archive is 160kbps files and 96kbps files, while spotify can stream 320kbps files and recently lossless audio files, and of course there’s the app itself.
They deprecated their audio features endpoint which provided metrics like "danceability". Their ToS also forbids building recommendation engines with that data. So I imagine they're a little protective of at least that section of the metadata dump.
But yeah I agree that the audio file itself probably isn't super important to keep secret. After all, it's not that hard to find cd rips or at worst, a youtube version to download.
We still live in a golden age of music piracy. It's easier than ever to download anything you ever wanted to listen to without paying a cent. It's just that keeping music locally fell out of fashion and streaming is so easy.
