A piracy-focused group says it has scraped nearly all of the music people actually listen to on Spotify, raising serious questions about platform security, copyright enforcement, and the thin line between digital preservation and outright piracy.
Anna’s Archive, a site that calls itself “the largest truly open library in human history,” claims it has downloaded 99.6 percent of Spotify’s most-listened-to tracks, amounting to nearly 300TB of data.
What was Actually Scrapped
Spotify currently hosts around 256 million tracks, but Anna’s Archive says it did not attempt to copy everything. Instead, it focused on what people play.
According to the group, it archived roughly 86 million tracks, prioritizing songs with any measurable popularity on Spotify. Using Spotify’s internal popularity metric, the group claims it captured almost every track with a popularity score above zero.
In practical terms, that means the archive allegedly contains nearly all mainstream and long-tail music that receives consistent listens, even if it excludes obscure or never-played tracks.
A “Backup” or Mass Piracy?
Anna’s Archive describes the operation as a “backup” intended for cultural preservation rather than redistribution. The group typically focuses on books and academic papers but says music fits within its broader mission to preserve human knowledge and culture.
That framing is likely to be controversial. While preservation arguments are often used in digital archiving circles, scraping and redistributing copyrighted music at this scale crosses into clear piracy territory, regardless of intent.
Spotify, artists, and labels would almost certainly see little distinction between a preservation archive and a downloadable torrent.
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The Data is Already Being Analyzed
Beyond collecting the files, Anna’s Archive has begun analyzing listening patterns from the scraped data. One early insight highlights just how uneven music consumption really is.
The group claims the three most-played songs on Spotify have more total streams than the bottom 100 million tracks combined. The top songs cited include:
- Billie Eilish – Birds of a Feather with over 3.1 billion streams
- Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars – Die With A Smile with just over 3 billion streams
- Bad Bunny – DtMF with more than 1.1 billion streams
The numbers reinforce a long-standing reality of streaming economics. A tiny fraction of songs dominate listener attention, while the vast majority barely register.
Spotify’s Response
Spotify has confirmed that it has disabled the accounts responsible for the scraping and implemented new safeguards to prevent similar attacks in the future.
Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. 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.
Still, the response feels reactive rather than preventative. If the claims are accurate, the data has already left the building.
Once hundreds of terabytes of music exist outside the platform, shutting down accounts does little to undo the damage.
This Exposes a Bigger Problem Which Goes Beyond Just Spotify
This incident highlights a growing tension in the streaming era. Platforms like Spotify control access to massive cultural catalogs, but they also create single points of failure for preservation, licensing, and artist compensation.
While Anna’s Archive frames its work as preservation, the lack of consent from rights holders makes the effort deeply problematic. At the same time, it exposes how fragile centralized streaming ecosystems can be when faced with large-scale automation and scraping.
For Spotify, it is a reminder that scale cuts both ways. What makes a service powerful also makes it an attractive target.
Whether this episode becomes a footnote or a turning point may depend on how quickly streaming platforms rethink security, access controls, and the long-term stewardship of digital culture.
