Spotify confirms data breach after pirate activist group scrapes and releases 86m songs
An activist group which says it wants to back-up the entirety of human culture claims 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, becoming the world’s largest ‘shadow library’.
It has now turned its attention to music, saying that the tracks will be released for free download via torrent, prioritised by how popular they are.
While they only scraped around 37% of Spotify’s total catalogue, they claimed this represents 99.6% of the music actually listened to.
In a long blog post justifying the theft, they said the scrape was ‘our humble attempt’ to start a ‘preservation archive’ for music: ‘Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.’
They said: ‘With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophe.’
For now, individual tracks will not be available to download, and they will only be released as part of large bundles of music as part of this cited aim to create an archive.
However, the blog writer said ‘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 music files themselves will be released next in order of popularity, followed by additional metadata and album art.
Anyone with enough storage will be able to download the archive themselves, but the group claim the bulk torrents will come to 300 terabytes, meaning you definitely won’t have room on a standard laptop: you’d need 20,000 gmail accounts (which are 15BG each) to store it all.
Some fear the ‘archive’ will be used to train AI models, with the use of copyrighted material to teach 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.
‘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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