Pirate group Anna’s Archive says it has scraped Spotify in its entirety

Anna’s Archive, the open-source search engine for shadow libraries, says it scraped Spotify’s total library of music. The group acquired metadata for round 256 million tracks, with 86 million precise songs, and is slightly below 300TB in complete measurement.

“Some time in the past, we found a strategy to scrape Spotify at scale. We noticed a task for us right here to construct a music archive primarily aimed toward preservation,” the group mentioned in a blog post. The pirated treasure trove of music represents over 15 million artists with over 58 million albums.

The group intends to make all recordsdata accessible for obtain for anybody with the accessible disk area. “This Spotify scrape is our humble try to begin such a “preservation archive” for music. In fact Spotify doesn’t have all of the music on the planet, however it’s an amazing begin,” the group wrote. The 86 million songs that the group has archived to date signify about 99.6 % of listens on the platform. This solely represents about 37 % of the entire and the group nonetheless has hundreds of thousands left to be archived.

The open-source website is generally centered on textual content like books and papers, which it says presents the best data density. The group says its purpose of “preserving humanity’s information and tradition” does not distinguish between media sorts. In fact none of that is precisely authorized, and the sharing or downloading of all these recordsdata is flagrantly in violation of IP safety legal guidelines.

Anna’s Archive contends that present collections of music, each bodily and digital, are over-indexed to the preferred artists or composed of unnecessarily massive file sizes on account of collectors’ concentrate on constancy. The group says that what it is amassed is by far the biggest music metadata database publicly accessible. The music recordsdata will probably be launched so as of recognition in phases.

“Spotify has recognized and disabled the nefarious consumer accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” a spokesperson instructed Engadget in an announcement. “We have applied new safeguards for these kind of anti-copyright assaults and are actively monitoring for suspicious conduct. Since day one, we’ve got stood with the artist group in opposition to piracy, and we’re actively working with our business companions to guard creators and defend their rights.”

Replace, December 22, 2025, 10:45PM ET: This story has been up to date so as to add Spotify’s assertion.