A popular archive hub says it has published a Spotify backup as bulk torrents totaling 300TB or roughly 86 million music files – and Spotify has confirmed the breach.
The group, called Anna’s Archive, says it has SQLite databases that contain the largest publicly available music metadata database, covering 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
Anna’s Archive says it usually focuses on text because it’s dense, but its mission is preserving knowledge and culture across media. It also claims it found a way to scrape Spotify at scale and sees this as a start at building a preservation-focused music archive.
Spotify has responded, sending the following statement to Billboard: “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.
“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.”
What the database release includes
In its write-up, the group argues music is already fairly well preserved, but points to three gaps: a long tail that only gets saved when someone cares enough (and torrents can be poorly seeded), an audiophile tilt toward huge lossless files that makes “everything” hard to keep, and the lack of an authoritative torrent list meant to represent all recorded music.
Its Spotify metadata dump is positioned as the fix. It claims metadata coverage for about 99.9% of artists, albums, and tracks, with the core artist, album, and track dataset under 200GB compressed, plus a separate audio analysis dataset listed at 4TB compressed.
According to the blog, Anna’s Archive says it has archived around 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens, but it plans to release those music files in popularity order, not as a single drop.
The practical takeaway is that this backup is metadata only for now, with audio coming in later – but given the quite granular promise of next steps from the group, it will remain to be seen how, and if, Spotify is able to stop this effort.