An activist group claiming it wants to preserve the entirety of human culture alleges it has illegally copied nearly every track listened to on Spotify.
Anna’s Archive, which is blocked in the UK, has already copied over 60 million books and nearly 100 million academic papers, making it the world’s largest ‘shadow library’.
It has now shifted its focus to music, stating that the tracks will be available for free download via torrent, prioritized by their popularity.
Although they only scraped around 37% of Spotify’s total catalog, they claimed this accounts for 99.6% of the music actually listened to.
In a lengthy blog post justifying the theft, they called the scrape ‘our humble attempt’ to establish a ‘preservation archive’ for music: ‘Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.’
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They stated: ‘With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes.’
For the time being, individual tracks will not be available for download, and they will only be released as part of large music bundles in line with their stated goal of creating an archive.
However, the blog writer mentioned ‘if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive’.
Torrents already appearing
Metadata for 256 million tracks has already been released, and the music files themselves will be released next in order of popularity, followed by additional metadata and album artwork.
Anyone with enough storage will be able to download the archive themselves, but the group claims the bulk torrents will amount to 300 terabytes, meaning you definitely won’t have room on a standard laptop: you’d need 20,000 Gmail accounts (which are 15GB each) to store it all.
Some fear the ‘archive’ will be used to train AI models, with the use of copyrighted material in training them already a hotly debated topic.
Ed Newton-Rex, who campaigns for protecting artists’ copyright, reshared an X post of a sly-looking cat, captioned: ‘AI companies seeing 300TB of music “archived” publicly’.
A Spotify spokesperson told Metro: ‘Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping.
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‘We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior.
‘Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.’
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