Anna’s Archive got ahold of Spotify’s music metadata and is offering it for free
Spotify’s library has been scooped up and released by pirate activists Anna’s Archive, just two weeks after the streaming giant released its “biggest Wrapped ever.”
The unprecedented data capture of nearly 300 terabytes was announced by the website in a December 20 blog post. The archive claims to have obtained metadata for 99.9 percent of Spotify’s 256 million audio tracks and files for 86 million music tracks, a library that represents approximately 99.6 percent of listens on the platform.
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“This is the world’s first fully open music ‘preservation archive’ (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space),” said Anna’s Archive. “With your help, the musical heritage of humanity will be forever protected from destruction caused by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts and other catastrophes.”
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Anna’s Archive has made the metadata library immediately available for public download and says it will release the rest of the scrap in stages, including music files and album art. It also released detailed metadata analysis, including stream counts, genre, and popularity analysis.
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“An investigation into unauthorized access revealed that a third party harvested public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access certain audio files on the platform. We are actively investigating the incident,” Spotify wrote in an initial statement to Android Authority. On December 22, Spotify said it had “identified and disabled harmful user accounts that were engaging in illegal scraping.” The streaming platform also said it was implementing new safeguards against further copyright attacks to combat piracy.
Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine that directs users to pirated, paid, or paid content like books and articles, has become a scourge for copyright holders on the Internet. Last month, Google removed more than 749 million search results links redirecting to Anna’s Archive, making up the vast majority of the 784 million link removal requests received by the company. According to a report by TorrentFreak, Anna’s archive URLs (annas-archive.se, annas-archive.org, and annas-archive.li) face the highest number of takedown requests from Google.
