Activist group claims to have scraped 86 million songs from Spotify
The group, named Anna’s Archive, says it now plans to release that music online
Spotify was the target of an “unauthorised” third-party data scrape earlier this week, with activist group Anna’s Archive claiming to have accessed millions of music files.
The group said it now plans to release scraped music online, which they claim amounts to a huge 86 million music tracks and 256 million rows of metadata, including artist and record names.
Spotify has since responded to the leak, in a statement seen by The Guardian, it assured users that it was not hacked, but “unlawfully scraped”, and has now “identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts” involved.
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“An investigation into unauthorised access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management] to access some of the platform’s audio files,” they said.
Spotify, which has a catalogue spanning over 100 million tracks, also said the leak did not compromise its entire music library, though Anna’s Archive claimed to have scraped 99.6% of all music listened to by users on the platform.
In a statement on Anna’s Blog, which shares updates about the activist group and bills Anna’s Archive as “the largest truly open library in human history”, the group claims to have scraped 300 terabytes of data in total.
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“It’s the world’s first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open,” the post reads. “A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.”
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” they added. “If there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive.”
The leak has sparked fears that AI companies could now use compromised material to train AI systems. Spotify does not believe the scraped files have been released yet.
Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor, follow her on Twitter
