Spotify Music Library Scraped, Released Online By Activist Pirate Group: 86M Files

A pirate activist group known as Anna’s Archive has claimed to have scraped and begun releasing a massive archive of Spotify’s music catalog, asserting it has backed up nearly all of the platform’s most popular tracks. As of Tuesday. Spotify has confirmed the breach.

Anna’s Archive claims to have scraped 86 million audio files from Spotify, representing approximately 99.6% of total listens on the platform, with the entire archive totaling around 300 terabytes in size.

The archive includes metadata for 256 million tracks—covering an estimated 99.9% of Spotify’s catalog—already released via torrent, with the actual music files planned for future release in order of popularity. The group has also indicated that individual file downloads may be added if there is sufficient demand.

The group states this constitutes the “world’s first preservation archive” for music, prioritizing tracks by popularity and aiming to protect humanity’s musical heritage from potential loss due to disasters or corporate decisions.

The full release of the music torrents are expected to in the coming days, organized by popularity and quality—160 kbit/s for popular tracks and 75 kbit/s for less popular ones to conserve space.

Spotify has confirmed the incident and stated that it has identified and disabled the user accounts involved in the unlawful scraping. The company emphasized its ongoing commitment to protecting artists and rights holders, noting it has implemented new safeguards against such anti-copyright attacks, and is actively monitoring for suspicious behavior.

Anna’s Archive, known for its shadow library of books and academic papers, frames the action as a preservation effort rather than pure piracy, arguing that existing digital archives are overly focused on popular content and high-quality files. The group acknowledges that Spotify does not contain all music ever produced but considers it a strong starting point.