Pirate Archive Anna claims to have removed 86 million songs from Spotify

Anti-piracy group Anna’s Archive says it has removed Spotify’s entire music library and plans to release it via torrents.

Spotify has about 256 million songs, and Anna’s archive contains metadata for about 99.9% of them. The group stored about 86 million music files, accounting for about 99.6% of all audio, with a size of about 300 terabytes. So far, only the metadata has been released, not the actual music.

“This Sotify scrape is our humble attempt to start ‘archiving’ music,” the band wrote in a press release. blog post. “Sure, Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a good start.”

Spotify told TechCrunch that it has identified and suspended the affected user accounts.

“We’ve put in place new defenses against these types of anti-copying and are monitoring suspicious activity,” a Spotify spokesperson said in an email. “Since day one, we’ve been fighting with the artist community in the fight against abuse, and we’re working hard with our industry partners to protect creators and protect their rights.”

Anna’s archive says that it often looks at documents, such as books and papers, but its purpose “to preserve knowledge and culture does not distinguish between types of media.”