Shadow ‘Archive’ Says It Copied Just about All of Spotify’s Music – Decrypt

Anna’s Archive, the shadow library greatest identified for making pirated ebooks and tutorial papers searchable, introduced this weekend what is perhaps the most important music piracy operation in historical past: “We backed up Spotify.”

The group claims it scraped 86 million audio recordsdata from Spotify, representing 99.6% of every part folks really take heed to on the platform. Complete dimension: slightly below 300 terabytes, distributed by way of bulk torrents.

Spotify is not pleased. A spokesperson informed Billboard that “a 3rd occasion scraped public metadata and used illicit ways to avoid DRM to entry a few of the platform’s audio recordsdata.” Word the cautious wording there: “some” audio recordsdata. Anna’s Archive says 86 million. Spotify is not confirming the dimensions. The corporate additionally referred to as the group “anti-copyright extremists” who had beforehand pirated content material from YouTube.

So, except for ripping off Spotify—and the recording artists, whose revenue is predominantly derived from royalty funds—what precisely did they get?

The numbers

Anna’s Archive claims metadata for 99% of Spotify’s library of 256 million tracks, together with audio recordsdata for the 86 million songs that truly matter—those folks play. The metadata database alone comprises 186 million distinctive ISRCs (Worldwide Normal Recording Codes). For comparability, MusicBrainz, the most important authorized open music database, has about 5 million. Anna’s Archive simply constructed one thing 37 occasions larger.

Common tracks had been preserved of their unique OGG Vorbis format at 160 kilobits per second—no re-encoding, no high quality loss. Much less widespread stuff received compressed to OGG Opus at 75 kbps to save lots of area. The group used Spotify’s personal reputation metric to prioritize what to seize first, specializing in tracks with reputation scores above zero.

Over 70% of Spotify’s 256 million tracks have a reputation rating of precisely zero. No person listens to them. The highest 10,000 songs span reputation scores of 70-100. Solely about 210,000 songs—roughly 0.1% of the catalog—have a reputation rating of fifty or greater. These 0.1% account for the overwhelming majority of all listening exercise.

The highest three songs on Spotify proper now? Woman Gaga and Bruno Mars’s “Die With A Smile” (3.07 billion streams), Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” (3.13 billion), and Dangerous Bunny’s “DtMF” (1.12 billion). These three tracks alone have extra complete performs than the underside 20 to 100 million songs mixed.

In different phrases, Spotify is usually a graveyard of songs no person will ever hear. The group determined to not archive that graveyard (the total catalog)—it might have required a further 700 terabytes of storage for content material representing simply 0.04% of listening exercise. A lot of it’s AI-generated slop anyway.

The bizarre stuff within the information

Anna’s Archive printed intensive evaluation of what they discovered. A few of it’s predictable. A few of it’s unusual.

Monitor durations cluster sharply at precisely 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00 minutes. The group says they do not know why. Album releases have exploded exponentially since 2015, with over 10 million albums dated 2023 alone—doubtless pushed by AI era and automatic uploads.

Digital/Dance is the most important style class by artist depend (520,075), adopted by Rock (370,179) and World/Conventional (202,529).

Additionally, imagine it or not, Opera, choral, and chamber music have probably the most artists per particular sub-genre.

The audio options information reveals that loudness correlates strongly with vitality (no shock), BPM clusters round 120 with a standard distribution, and most tracks have low “speechiness” and “instrumentalness” scores—which means vocals dominate. C main and G main are the commonest keys. About 13.5% of all tracks on Spotify are tagged as specific content material.

Why do that?

Anna’s Archive frames it as preservation, not piracy. “We noticed a task for us right here to construct a music archive primarily geared toward preservation,” the weblog put up reads. The group argues that current music archiving efforts focus too closely on widespread artists and audiophile-quality codecs (lossless FLAC), leaving obscure music susceptible to vanishing if platforms change insurance policies or shut down.

There’s some fact to that. Spotify controls 256 million tracks and may take away content material, change licensing phrases, or disappear completely. Decentralized torrent distribution creates redundancy that may’t be shut down by any single entity. The information is already unfold throughout hundreds of torrent nodes worldwide.

However let’s be actual. That is additionally simply piracy. Spotify pays artists someplace between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. In accordance with Dittomusic’s Spotify income calculator, 1 million reproductions would yield an artist $4,370 in royalties. Free distribution through torrents eliminates even that minimal compensation.

Each issues are true directly.

The authorized meteor is coming

Anna’s Archive already faces mounting authorized stress. Belgium issued blocking orders with fines as much as €500,000 in July 2025. The UK secured Excessive Courtroom blocks in December 2024. Germany’s main ISPs blocked the positioning’s fundamental domains in October 2025. In accordance with its personal transparency report, Google has eliminated 749 million Anna’s Archive URLs from search outcomes—that is 5% of all DMCA takedown requests the search engine has acquired since 2012.

The Web Archive—a professional nonprofit—settled a lawsuit over its Nice 78 Venture for digitizing out of date 78rpm data after publishers sought $621 million in damages. Anna’s Archive simply archived 31,000 occasions extra tracks, all present, all in-demand. The music trade’s authorized response will make the Web Archive case look quaint.

On Hacker Information, commenters debated whether or not the archive would really be helpful for customers given Spotify’s comfort. One identified that Anna’s Archive already presents “enterprise-level” entry to its ebook archives for tens of hundreds of {dollars}—basically promoting bulk information entry to AI corporations for coaching.

For now, solely metadata has been totally launched. The audio recordsdata are rolling out step by step by way of bulk torrents, beginning with the preferred tracks. Anna’s Archive requested customers to assist seed the torrents and talked about they could add particular person file downloads if there’s sufficient curiosity.

The lawsuits are in all probability coming. The one query is whether or not the archive survives them—and at this level, it in all probability does not matter. The information is already on the market, distributed throughout hundreds of nodes that may’t be centrally shut down. That is the entire level of torrents.