In a move that rattles the foundations of the global music streaming economy, pirate-activist collective Anna’s Archive says it has quietly harvested the listening core of Spotify—assembling what it calls the first true preservation archive of modern music.
Spotify rejects that framing outright. The company has branded the group “anti-copyright extremists,” shut down accounts linked to the operation, and rolled out new defenses. But the scale—and intent—of what was taken has reignited uncomfortable questions about ownership, access, and who controls humanity’s cultural memory in the age of platforms.
Not the Full Catalog—But Almost All the Listening
According to Anna’s Archive, the scrape pulled:
256 million rows of Spotify track metadata
86 million audio files
Roughly 300 terabytes of data in total
While those audio files represent only about 37% of Spotify’s total catalog, the group claims they correspond to 99.6% of all listening activity on the platform—effectively capturing what people actually hear, not just what exists.
That distinction is central to the group’s argument: streaming services, they say, privilege scale and popularity while leaving vast swaths of music culturally fragile and technically dependent on private companies.
How It Was Done
Spotify maintains there was no breach and no user data exposure. Instead, investigators believe the activists:
Scraped metadata via Spotify’s public web API
Used DRM-bypassing techniques to download audio at scale
The metadata database has already been released via
torrents. Audio files and album artwork, Anna’s Archive says, will follow in
phased drops ordered by popularity.
Spotify Pushes Back Hard
Spotify condemned the operation as unlawful and malicious.
“Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user
accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” a spokesperson said. “We’ve
implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are
actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour.”
The company stressed that this was neither a leak nor a
cybersecurity failure—and reiterated its stance as a defender of artists’
rights against piracy.
A New Fear: AI Training at Global Scale
Beyond lost revenue, industry experts are focused on a
deeper risk: data reuse.
Mass music datasets like this could become fuel for
unlicensed generative AI music models, echoing how earlier systems were trained
on scraped YouTube audio. If that happens, labels fear a future where artists
compete not just with pirates—but with machines trained on their own work,
without consent or compensation.
From Books to Beats: Who Is Anna’s Archive?
Anna’s Archive emerged in 2022 after authorities seized
Z-Library, positioning itself as a search layer over shadow libraries such as Library
Genesis and Sci-Hub. Its mission expanded in 2025 to include music—arguing that
digital culture is paradoxically fragile, locked behind licenses that can
disappear overnight.
The Spotify project, the group says, is not about free
streaming—but about ensuring music survives beyond corporate platforms.
What Comes Next
Spotify’s internal investigation is ongoing, particularly
around how DRM protections were bypassed and whether additional safeguards are
needed. Meanwhile, the staggered release strategy means the industry may be
dealing with the fallout for months.
At the heart of the clash is a growing contradiction of the digital age: music has never been more accessible—yet never less owned by the public. Whether Anna’s Archive is a preservation effort or a sophisticated act of piracy may ultimately be decided not by rhetoric, but by courts, creators, and the next generation of AI trained on today’s sounds.
By - Aaradhay Sharma
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