Shadow ‘Archive’ Says It Copied Virtually All of Spotify’s Music
Anna’s Archive, a shadow library known for pirated academic material, claims to have scraped and archived 86 million Spotify audio files—about 99.6% of tracks actually listened to on the platform, distributed via torrents totaling nearly 300TB. This collection includes audio and extensive metadata (186 million unique ISRCs), dwarfing the largest legal music databases. Popular songs are preserved at original quality, while lesser-known tracks are compressed for space; the project excludes over 70% of Spotify’s full catalog, which receives no plays and is largely low-quality or AI-generated. Analysis reveals song popularity is extremely concentrated: the top 0.1% of tracks dominate listening, and the three most-streamed songs have more plays than millions of others combined. Data shows trends in genre, track length, and musical attributes. Anna’s Archive argues this is digital preservation, highlighting the fragility of centralized music access, but the operation eliminates streaming royalties and is clear piracy. Legal pressure against the group is mounting across Europe, but the decentralized release via torrents means the data likely cannot be fully removed. For now, only metadata is public; audio files are being released in stages.
