A pirate group known as Anna's Archive has announced it scraped Spotify's vast music library, acquiring metadata for 256 million tracks and 86 million audio files totaling nearly 300 terabytes. The group frames the effort as cultural preservation, planning to release the files publicly despite copyright violations. Spotify has responded by disabling involved accounts and enhancing safeguards against such activities.
On December 20, Anna's Archive, an open-source search engine typically focused on books and papers, revealed in a blog post that it had scraped Spotify's entire music catalog. The haul includes metadata for around 256 million tracks from over 15 million artists and 58 million albums, with 86 million actual songs archived so far—representing about 99.6% of listens on the platform and roughly 37% of the total library. The data totals just under 300 terabytes.
"A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," the group stated. They described the collection as "our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music," noting that while Spotify doesn't hold all the world's music, it's a significant start. Anna's Archive plans to release the files in stages, ordered by popularity, beginning with metadata via torrent, followed by audio files, additional metadata, album art, and patching tools to reconstruct originals. They claim this creates the largest publicly available music metadata database, criticizing existing collections for overemphasizing popular artists or high-fidelity files.
The move is illegal, flagrantly violating intellectual property laws by enabling unauthorized sharing and downloading. Spotify quickly reacted, announcing it had identified and disabled the accounts used for the scraping. "We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," a spokesperson told CNET. The company emphasized its stance: "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights."
Anna's Archive's broader mission is to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture across media types, undeterred by legal risks. They are considering allowing individual file downloads and have solicited donations to support the project.
