Following its December 21 release of 256 million rows of Spotify metadata, pirate activist group Anna’s Archive has uploaded 86 million audio files from Spotify's library to an open archive. Spotify has disabled the involved accounts, added safeguards, and is investigating the scrape that bypassed digital rights protections.
Pirate activist group Anna’s Archive, known for archiving books and papers, expanded its Spotify scrape project by uploading 86 million audio files to an open archive on Sunday, December 22, 2025, reports Billboard. This follows the group's December 21 announcement of releasing 256 million rows of track metadata, with initial plans for peer-to-peer sharing of the audio files in 300 terabytes of torrents.
The group frames the effort as preserving 'humanity's knowledge and culture,' noting Spotify's library is 'a good start.' Spotify confirmed unauthorized access, stating a third party scraped public metadata and circumvented digital rights management (DRM) to obtain audio files. The company has disabled the malicious accounts and implemented new safeguards while continuing its investigation.
Cybersecurity expert Marcus Murray clarifies that scraping public data is not inherently illegal, but distributing copyrighted audio is. He assesses the breach as focused on music rather than user data, though risks remain.
This development intensifies debates on data preservation, platform security, and copyright enforcement in streaming services.
