Totally explains this part of the current top comment here:

> but much more often it feels like a 20 second section was used to define the original song and it misses the underlying concept

Yeah, like the linked The Medallion Calls example catches similarities to the slow starting section of the track and totally misses the main part

Even so, how do you get the 120M previews?

Apple has a public API with some rate limiting that returns a link to the preview audio file, see:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/lookup?id=1023678453 (https://www.chrisjmendez.com/2017/06/19/working-with-itunes-...)

So probably all that is required is a couple threads downloading and a proxy service with a large pool of IP addresses randomly rotating on every request. Maybe OP also found an undocumented API endpoint somewhere that was not rate limited.

... without getting banned?