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Spotify responded after reports indicated that a group had scraped its music library with the intention of creating a publicly accessible “preservation archive”, as per loudwire. Early Monday (Dec. 22), reports emerged that a “pirate activist group” had extracted metadata from Spotify’s collection and released it to the public. Billboard identified Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine, as among the first to highlight the incident. Anna’s Archive describes itself as the “largest truly open library in human history” and states that its efforts aim to promote “preservation” by exposing available Spotify music files. Following the incident, Spotify announced it had identified the user accounts responsible for the data breach.
Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior.
The company clarified that only publicly available playlists created by users were involved in the incident. Anna’s Archive claims to have access to approximately 86 million of Spotify’s music files, representing a subset of the total 256 million tracks. The leaked data includes metadata and album art associated with each song, although only the metadata appears to have been made publicly accessible so far. The platform has indicated plans to release the music files and album art on its torrents page at a later time. Furthermore, Anna’s Archive reports that it has analyzed the obtained metadata and has begun sharing its insights with the public.
The metadata reportedly encompassed various attributes, including a popularity score assigned to individual tracks and stream counts. Although it is believed that the breach involved less than 40 percent of Spotify’s entire music catalog, Anna’s Archive asserts that the obtained songs account for approximately 99.6 percent of the platform’s total listens. Among the high-level insights publicly shared by Anna’s Archive are notable trends, like the number of albums released annually increased from 8 million in 2023 to nearly 10.5 million in 2024. Or he most prevalent musical genre on Spotify, in terms of artist count, is opera, followed by choral and chamber music. Full-length albums on the platform predominantly contain ten tracks. Approximately two million albums are allegedly duplicated, often due to updated versions or releases under different licensing agreements. Furthermore, it is claimed that the musical key most frequently used in songs on Spotify is C.
