Spotify Responds To Unauthorized 300TB Archive Of 256 Million Tracks

Spotify is the victim of what may be the greatest act of music piracy in history and the company is not happy. Recently, Anna's Archive released a massive 300 TB of torrents, which reportedly includes the metadata of 265 million tracks, 186 million unique IRSCs, and 86 million songs. The metadata composes "99.9% of tracks", while the 86 million songs compose "99.6% of listens". The quality of tracks varies from 160 kb/s OGG Vorbis for the most popular tracks to OGG Opus at 75 kb/s for the least popular. Per Anna's Archive, the goal of the project is to be the world's first fully-open "preservation archive" for music, but at the moment, only the metadata has been released. Music files, additional metadata, album art, and ztsd patch files are all expected to follow soon.

In a statement to Android Authority's coverage of the incident, reps from Spotify said that "An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform's audio files. We are actively investigating the incident." As AA notes, Spotify's statement doesn't confirm the full scale of Anna's Archive data scraping, but Spotify is also in the precarious position of having to deal with virtually the entire music industry in the fallout of this incident.


Premium Spotify subscribers will still enjoy the most seamless access to its entire library, including reasonably high-quality lossless audio files. Spotify's Free tier will likely be more compelling to casual users than sorting through terabytes of torrent files as well, especially since forced shuffle is no longer foisted on listeners. Even higher quality audio is available through services like Tidal or more quality-focused torrents, but there's a reason most people still turn to affordable streaming services like Spotify instead of mass piracy.

It's hard to predict where things will go from here. Anna's Archive is already a self-described shadow library, and it may prove impossible for Spotify or its music industry partners to take any kind of large-scale legal action that could take the torrents or Anna's Archive offline. Android Authority is correct in stating that this move is illegal, regardless of intent—but enforcement is a whole other story.

Once Pandora's Box is open, there's not much that can be done to close it. Realistically, most if not all of this music could already be streamed free or pirated from other sources, anyway. The actual damages done by this move will be difficult to quantify—as always, the greatest way to compete with piracy is to provide a better, more convenient service than what the pirating offers, per the wise words of Valve's Gabe Newell. Spotify's prominence suggests the company is already doing that, though artists have had a lot to say about low payouts on the platform.