A piracy group has targeted Spotify and claims it illegally copied nearly every song actually listened to on the platform. As a result, the claim has raised fresh concerns over copyright protection and the use of music data.
According to the group, Anna’s Archive scraped around 86 million tracks from Spotify and plans to release them for free via torrent downloads. Although the group admits it captured only about 37% of Spotify’s total catalogue, it nevertheless claims this subset represents 99.6% of all music listened to on the platform.
Notably, authorities block Anna’s Archive in the UK, yet the group already hosts more than 60 million books and nearly 100 million academic papers, making it the world’s largest so-called “shadow library.” In a lengthy blog post, the group described the music scrape as an effort to create a long-term “preservation archive.”
In its defense, the group wrote, “Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.” It further argued that archiving music would protect “humanity’s musical heritage” from loss caused by war, natural disasters, or funding cuts.
Torrents and massive data volumes
For now, the group says it will not release individual tracks. Instead, it plans to distribute the music only through large bundled torrents. So far, the group has published metadata for 256 million tracks and says it will release the audio files next based on popularity, followed by additional metadata and album artwork.
At full scale, the archive could reach 300 terabytes, far exceeding the storage capacity of most personal devices. To illustrate the size, Anna’s Archive joked that storing the entire collection would require the equivalent of 20,000 Gmail accounts.
Fears over AI training
Meanwhile, the announcement has sparked concern that the archive could serve as training data for artificial intelligence models. This comes as the use of copyrighted material for AI training remains a hotly debated legal and ethical issue.
Highlighting the risk, copyright campaigner Ed Newton-Rex reshared a post on X showing a cat, captioned: “AI companies seeing 300TB of music ‘archived’ publicly.”
Spotify responds
In response, Spotify said it has acted against the alleged scraping. A company spokesperson told Metro that Spotify identified and disabled accounts involved in unlawful activity.
“Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” the spokesperson said. Additionally, the company said it has implemented new safeguards against anti-copyright attacks and continues to monitor suspicious behavior.
Ultimately, Spotify reiterated that it stands with artists and works closely with industry partners to protect creators’ rights.
Taken together, the episode highlights the mounting challenges facing streaming platforms as large-scale data scraping, digital piracy, and AI-driven copyright disputes increasingly collide.