Spotify’s collection was harvested and made public by pirate activists Anna’s Archive just two weeks after the streaming service unveiled its “largest Wrapped ever.”
The extraordinary data acquisition of nearly 300 terabytes was revealed by the site in a Dec. 20 blog entry. The archive claims it secured metadata for 99.9 percent of Spotify’s 256 million tracks and audio files for 86 million musical pieces, amounting to a library that accounts for about 99.6 percent of listens on the service.
“It’s the world’s inaugural ‘preservation archive’ for music which is entirely accessible (meaning it can easily be replicated by anyone with sufficient storage space),” stated Anna’s Archive. “With your assistance, humanity’s musical legacy will be eternally safeguarded against destruction from natural disasters, conflicts, funding cuts, and other crises.”
Anna’s Archive made the metadata library promptly available for public download and mentioned it would unveil the remaining data in phases, which include music files and album artwork. It also provided a detailed analysis of the metadata encompassing stream counts, genres, and popularity metrics.
“An investigation into unpermitted access found that a third party harvested public metadata and deployed illicit methods to bypass DRM to reach certain audio files from the platform. We are currently probing the incident,” Spotify expressed in an initial statement to Android Authority. As of Dec. 22, Spotify stated it has “identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts involved in unlawful scraping.” The streaming service also indicated it is putting in place new protections against future copyright infringements to tackle piracy.
Anna’s Archive, an open-source search engine that directs users to pirated, paid, or paywalled materials such as books and articles, has become a significant headache for copyright owners throughout the web. Last month, Google eliminated over 749 million search links that pointed to Anna’s Archive, comprising a vast majority of the 784 million link removal requests the company received. As reported by TorrentFreak, Anna’s Archive URLs (annas-archive.se, annas-archive.org, and annas-archive.li) encounter the most Google takedown requests.