Pirate group copies almost entire Spotify music catalog
Activist group "Anna’s Archive" says it has accessed 86 million audio files and plans to make them public.
The world’s largest music streaming service Spotify has been hijacked by a group of pirate activists. A blog post by “Anna’s Archive” claims that the group gained access to more than 250 million metadata and millions of audio files from the streaming platform.
In a blog post titled “Backing up Spotify,” Anna’s Archive explains how it believes it has built the “world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music” through the move.
It says it has the metadata of 256 million tracks, plus the audio files for 86 million of those songs. The group says that represents 99.6% of Spotify listens.
Anna’s Archive has posted the metadata on its torrent site and says it plans to release the audio files later. More metadata and album art will follow. It says the files will be released “in order of popularity,” using Spotify metrics to decide what to release first.
A spokesperson for Spotify said, “An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.”
The hacker group said, “For now this is a torrents-only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive.”
The group became famous for its goal of preserving books, newspapers, magazines, and more through torrents. It calls itself “the largest truly open library in human history,” with access to over 61 million books and 95 million papers.
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