Spotify has officially responded to Anna’s Archive’s massive music scraping project, confirming they have identified and disabled the “nefarious user accounts” responsible for the unlawful data theft, as per Android Authority. This response is definitely aggressive and shows the company isn’t messing around when it comes to copyright issues.
The platform released a statement addressing the claims, “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.”
So, what exactly did Anna’s Archive pull off to warrant this official counter-attack? This group, which you might know better for backing up books and research papers, claims it scraped almost the entirety of the music streaming giant. This is an enormous archive, weighing in at just under 300TB. The group says they archived metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files for 86 million songs. They insist this coverage represents around 99.6% of all listens on Spotify.
If that sounds enormous, it is
Anna’s Archive says this database is now the largest publicly available music metadata database in the entire world. The group is trying to frame this massive data rip as a “preservation archive” for modern music. They argue that while the super-popular songs are probably backed up everywhere, huge chunks of lesser-known music could totally disappear if streaming platforms lose licenses or unexpectedly shut down. They said this is “a great start” for preserving modern music history.
Let’s be clear: this project is not legal. Spotify licenses almost all of its music from rights holders and record labels under strict legal terms. Mass-scraping these files and then redistributing them via bulk torrents violates Spotify’s terms of service. Worse, it violates copyright law in many countries. Copyright law generally doesn’t make exceptions for something like “good intentions,” even if Anna’s Archive is genuinely worried about preservation rather than just straight-up piracy.
The technical side of the archive is interesting, though. The audio itself mostly comes straight from Spotify. To save space, popular tracks are stored in their original 160kbps format, but less-played songs were re-encoded into smaller files. Right now, only the metadata is fully available to the public. The actual music files are being released gradually, starting with the most popular tracks first. You should also know that anything released after July 2025 may be missing from this massive archive.
Before this recent statement, Spotify had indicated they had identified “that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.” That older statement avoided confirming the sheer scale that Anna’s Archive described. Spotify now says only “some” of its audio files were accessed, which contradicts Anna’s Archive’s audacious claim that they archived music covering 99.6% of all listens.
It’s completely unclear how much of the platform was truly affected or whether Spotify and the major record companies will pursue full legal action to yank the scraped data off the torrent networks. We have seen crackdowns on some anime piracy sites in recent years.
While they can’t do much about AI music, we’ll definitely have to wait and see if they can put the genie back in the bottle on this one.
Published: Dec 23, 2025 04:30 pm