Massive Pirate Library Leaks 86 Million Spotify Songs
▼ Summary
– Anna’s Archive, a shadow library, has scraped metadata for 99.9% of Spotify’s tracks and the audio files for 86 million popular songs, planning to release them via torrents.
– The group states it used Spotify’s popularity metric to prioritize downloads, aiming to create a “preservation archive” of music.
– Spotify responded by identifying and disabling the user accounts involved and implementing new protections against such scraping attacks.
– The company asserts it is actively monitoring for suspicious activity and working with industry partners to combat piracy and protect creators.
– This incident follows Google’s recent removal of 749 million links to Anna’s Archive domains from search results due to copyright complaints.
In a significant development for the digital music industry, a massive data leak has reportedly exposed millions of songs from the Spotify platform. The activist group known as Anna’s Archive claims to have scraped and archived approximately 86 million songs from Spotify, a figure representing a substantial portion of the service’s most-listened-to content. According to the group, while this number constitutes about 37 percent of the total songs on Spotify, it accounts for a staggering 99.6 percent of all listens, highlighting the concentration of streaming around popular tracks.
The group, which calls itself the world’s largest shadow library, stated its actions were part of an effort to create a preservation archive for music. It utilized Spotify’s own popularity metrics to prioritize which tracks to download first. The initial data release involves a torrent containing metadata, such as album art, song titles, and artist names, for nearly all of Spotify’s 256 million tracks. The group has announced intentions to eventually make the actual music files, totaling an estimated 300 terabytes, available at a later date.
Anna’s Archive typically focuses on archiving books and academic papers, but in a blog post, it explained it had discovered a method to scrape Spotify on a massive scale. The leaked metadata has already yielded interesting insights, revealing that the Electronic/Dance genre has the highest number of tracks in the dataset, with over 520,000 entries, and that 120 beats per minute is the most common tempo among the popular songs archived.
This incident follows recent enforcement actions against the group. Last month, Google reported removing 749 million links to Anna’s Archive domains from its search results in response to copyright complaints. In reaction to the leak, Spotify has publicly condemned the activity. A company spokesperson, Laura Batey, stated that Spotify has identified and disabled the user accounts responsible for what it termed unlawful scraping.
The streaming service emphasized its commitment to artist rights, noting it has implemented new safeguards against these anti-copyright attacks and is actively monitoring for suspicious behavior. “Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights,” Batey said in an official statement. The event underscores the ongoing tension between open-access activism and the copyright enforcement mechanisms of major digital platforms.
(Source: The Verge)
