US EditionSpotify's Music Catalog Leaked in Massive Data Breach
Anna's Archive backed up 300 terabytes of Spotify data, preserving metadata for 256 million tracks and audio for 86 million, covering 99.6% of Spotify listens.
- Anna’s Archive announced on December 20, 2025 that it backed up 86 million music files representing 99.6% of all Spotify listens and released a 300TB archive via bulk torrents.
- Anna’s Archive framed the upload as preservation, arguing Spotify is a single point of failure and calling it the world’s first comprehensive open music preservation archive for archivists.
- The archive’s metadata database contains 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs, plus 6.6 million playlists with 1.7 billion playlist tracks, preserving files in OGG Vorbis and OGG Opus.
- At the same per-track penalty, theoretical exposure could reach $19,400,000,000,000, and the Internet Archive settled for $621 million, greatly increasing Anna’s Archive's legal risks.
- Most musicians make under $5,000 yearly, and Spotify says it will tighten API access and anti-scraping measures as torrents create decentralized, hard-to-shut-down backups.
95 Articles
95 Articles
Spotify's Entire Music Library was Scraped by a Piracy Activist Group for a "Preservation Archive"
Anna’s Archive, an open-source search engine that has created what it calls the “largest truly open library in human history,” has scraped Spotify’s library and archived around 86 million music files that will be distributed in bulk torrents in just under 300TB in total size. Billboard first reported that the group published a blog post […] The post Spotify’s Entire Music Library was Scraped by a Piracy Activist Group for a “Preservation Archive…
After the books, it is now the place of music. Anna’s Archives, an online platform known for its ambitious project to create “the greatest open library in the history of mankind”, may soon be...
The Anna's Archives group has saved 86 million Spotify titles and the metadata of 256 million titles in order to create "archives of preservation" open music. This flaw has no impact on platform usersThe Spotify music streaming service announced on Monday that it has disabled the accounts of a group of hackers, who claimed to have "guarded" millions of music files and metadata from the platform.The Anna's Archives group had declared on a blog th…
Pirate Activists Announce They Scraped Spotify in Massive 300 Terabyte Archive
A large chunk of Spotify could soon be available to download online for free, if you’ve got enough disk space to spare. Anna’s Archive, a controversial non-profit project that aims to preserve all of humanity’s culture and knowledge, announced over the weekend that it has managed to back up…
Spotify disables accounts tied to alleged copying of its music catalog
Spotify said it disabled user accounts involved in unlawfully copying large portions of its music catalog after a group claimed it had backed up most of the platform’s content. “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior,” a Spotify spokesperson told Gizmodo on Mond…
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