Spotify's entire music library leaked online in 300TB torrent
What's the story
Piracy activist group Anna's Archive has scraped and archived roughly 86 million music files from Spotify, covering about 99.6% of all streams on the platform. The total data amounts to nearly 300TB, distributed in bulk torrents sorted by popularity. According to Anna's Archive, the release also includes the largest publicly available music metadata database, featuring 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRC codes.
Company response
Spotify confirms unauthorized access; investigation underway
In a statement to Billboard, Spotify confirmed that a third party had scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM) protections. This allowed them to gain access to some of the platform's audio files. "We are actively investigating the incident," a representative for Spotify said, confirming their awareness of the situation and ongoing efforts to address it.
Impact analysis
Potential implications of Spotify's data scrape
The data scrape could allow anyone with enough storage and a personal media streaming server like Plex to create their own free version of Spotify. However, this would be limited by copyright law and enforcement fears. The total number of audio files on Spotify exceeds those mentioned by Anna's Archive, but this incident still has the potential to surpass the largest open music archive available, MusicBrainz, which has about five million unique tracks.
Justification
Anna's Archive defends Spotify data scrape as preservation effort
Anna's Archive, which usually focuses on books and papers, has defended its Spotify data scrape as an effort to "build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation." The group said this project is part of its mission of "preserving humanity's knowledge and culture." They also acknowledged that while Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, it was still a good start for their initiative.