Anna’s Archive, a prominent digital preservation platform, has announced the largest unauthorized extraction of Spotify music data ever recorded.
The hacktivist group scraped approximately 86 million songs from the streaming service, representing nearly 99.6% of all user listening activity on the platform.
The collection, totaling just under 300TB, includes metadata for an estimated 99.9% of Spotify’s approximately 256 million tracks.
This marks a significant expansion beyond Anna’s Archive’s traditional focus on preserving books and academic papers, demonstrating the group’s broader mission to safeguard humanity’s cultural knowledge.
According to Anna’s Archive, existing music preservation efforts suffer from critical limitations.
Most efforts focus heavily on popular artists while neglecting the extensive catalog of lesser-known musicians.
Additionally, many archives prioritize maximum audio quality using lossless formats, which dramatically increases storage requirements and limits comprehensive preservation.
“No authoritative archive exists that aims to represent all music ever produced,” the group explained in their announcement.
Spotify, despite lacking some obscure recordings, provided an ideal starting point for building a truly comprehensive music preservation database.
Technical Execution
The scrape utilized Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize which tracks to archive. Files with higher popularity ratings were preserved in their original OGG Vorbis format at 160kbit/s quality.
For less popular tracks, the group reencoded files to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s, reducing storage demands while maintaining acceptable audio quality for most listeners.
The extracted metadata is being distributed through torrent files, with music files released in stages based on popularity rankings.
The data includes artist information, album details, genre classifications, and audio analysis features generated by Spotify’s algorithms.
This incident highlights persistent security vulnerabilities in large-scale music streaming platforms and raises questions about data protection standards.
While Anna’s Archive frames the effort as cultural preservation, music rights holders and Spotify will likely view the operation as illegal copyright infringement on a massive scale.
The hacktivist group is calling for community support through torrent seeding and donations to ensure long-term preservation of the archived content.
Anna’s Archive, known for operating the world’s largest shadow library for academic papers and books, continues expanding its mission beyond traditional text-based materials.
The group argues that music preservation serves the public interest by protecting cultural heritage from loss due to platform shutdowns, licensing disputes, or technological obsolescence.
Whether this approach constitutes legitimate preservation or large-scale piracy remains a contentious debate in digital rights and preservation communities.
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