Megami-Renai-Circulation-21/Shibata-01

Bad Apple – High Resolution Album Cover Dataset

Overview

• Content: 39 million full-resolution album covers from Apple Music
• Resolution: Native resolution (3000×3000px or lesser)
• Total size: 44TB
• Format: WebDataset tar shards (each ~30GB)

Dataset Structure

Due to platform storage limitations, this dataset is distributed across multiple repositories:

• Primary covers: ...-01 through ...-[N]
• Metadata: Grouped together with the cover it is from

Access Notes

• All images are provided in their original resolution as delivered by Apple's CDN
• Each shard contains approximately 6TiB album covers

Usage

1. Download all cover shards from the repository series

Why This Exists

Large-scale cultural datasets are essential for scientific progress. When platforms impose arbitrary storage limits, researchers resort to creative distribution methods. This dataset exists because science shouldn't be gated by storage quotas.

Citation

@software{badapple25,
  title = {Bad Apple: 39M High-Resolution Apple Music Covers},
  year = {2025}
}