Pirate library rips 86 million of the most popular songs on Spotify
Spotify says it has launched new protections against “anti-copyright attacks” after open source library and pirate activist group Anna’s Archive said it had ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available as torrents, as previously reported Billboard. According to the group, “We have archived approximately 86 million songs on Spotify, ranked by decreasing popularity. While this only represents 37 percent of songs, it represents approximately 99.6 percent of plays.”
The first released torrent says it contains metadata, such as album art, song title and artist name, belonging to 99.9% of Spotify’s 256 million tracks. The group announces that it plans to make the 300 TB of music files available later.
Anna’s Archive, which describes itself as “the world’s largest shadow library”, claims to have “backed up Spotify” as part of an attempt to create a “preservation archive” for music by using Spotify’s “popularity” metric to determine which tracks to download first. It says the metadata reveals information such as which genre has the most tracks (Electronic/Dance, with 520,075) and that 120 BPM is the most popular tempo.
Although Anna’s Archive primarily focuses on backing up books and research materials, her blog post states that she has “discovered a way to remove Spotify on a large scale.” Last month, Google said it removed 749 million links to Anna’s Archive domains from its search engine due to copyright complaints, as reported TorrentFreak.
In a statement to The edgeSpotify spokeswoman Laura Batey said the company “identified and disabled harmful user accounts engaged in illegal scraping.”
Full statement from Spotify, from Batey:
Spotify identified and disabled nefarious user accounts that were engaging in illegal scraping. We have implemented new protections against these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring suspicious behavior. Since day one, we have stood alongside the artist community against piracy and we actively work with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.
