Shadow library claims it “backed up Spotify” – all 300TB of it

Anna’s Archive, the open supply search engine for shadow libraries, has introduced it has successfully “backed up Spotify” – archiving a whole lot of thousands and thousands of tracks’ value of metadata and audio recordsdata, and distributing the entire thing by way of torrents.

Greatest recognized for preserving books and tutorial papers, the group says it scraped metadata for round 256 million tracks and audio recordsdata for roughly 86 million songs. By its personal estimate, that accounts for about 99.6 % of all listens on Spotify, bundled right into a dataset weighing slightly below 300TB and sorted by ‘recognition’.

In a weblog submit, Anna’s Archive describes the venture as the biggest publicly out there music metadata database on the planet, framing it as a long-term, totally open “preservation archive” for contemporary music. The group argues that whereas chart-topping hits are unlikely to vanish, swathes of lesser-known music may very well be misplaced if streaming platforms drop licences or shut down solely.

“Some time in the past, we found a technique to scrape Spotify at scale. We noticed a task for us right here to construct a music archive primarily geared toward preservation,” the submit states. “This Spotify scrape is our humble try to begin such a ‘preservation archive’ for music. After all Spotify doesn’t have all of the music on the planet, nevertheless it’s an awesome begin.”

Based on Anna’s Archive, a lot of the audio originates from Spotify itself. Well-liked tracks are saved of their unique 160kbps format, whereas less-played songs have been reencoded into smaller recordsdata to avoid wasting area. The archive is claimed to include about 37 % of all songs out there on Spotify as of July 2025. Metadata torrents are already dwell, whereas the audio recordsdata are being launched in levels, beginning with the most-streamed tracks.

Legally, nevertheless, the venture sits on very shaky floor. Spotify licenses the overwhelming majority of its catalogue below strict agreements with labels and rights holders, and mass scraping and redistribution of audio recordsdata – preservation-minded or not – violates each its phrases of service and copyright legislation in lots of jurisdictions.

Following the announcement, the streaming large launched a press release confirming it had recognized and disabled the accounts accountable: “Spotify has recognized and disabled the nefarious consumer accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” the corporate says. “We’ve applied new safeguards for all these anti-copyright assaults and are actively monitoring for suspicious conduct. Since day one, we’ve stood with the artist neighborhood in opposition to piracy, and we’re actively working with our business companions to guard creators and defend their rights.”