A hacktivist group linked to the shadow library Anna’s Archive has carried out a massive scrape of Spotify, releasing a torrent collection containing around 86 million audio tracks along with metadata for 256 million songs.
The group, best known for archiving academic papers and books, described the release as the world’s first open “music preservation archive.”
The full collection is nearly 300 terabytes in size and is claimed to include the largest publicly available music metadata database.
According to Anna’s Archive, the data covers about 99.9% of Spotify’s catalog and represents 99.6% of all streams on the platform. In a blog post, the group said it had “discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.”
The group argues that existing music archiving efforts focus too much on high-quality audiophile formats or only on popular artists, leaving obscure and lesser-known music at risk of being lost.
“Our mission of preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture doesn’t distinguish between media types,” the group said.
To manage the enormous data size, the archive prioritizes audio quality based on Spotify’s popularity metrics.
Popular tracks are preserved in their original OGG Vorbis format at 160 kbps, while tracks with zero popularity were re-encoded to OGG Opus at lower bitrates to save space.
The data is being released in stages via BitTorrent, with metadata published first, followed by music files ordered by popularity.
The group is urging users to seed the torrents to protect the archive from “natural disasters, wars, and budget cuts.”
Despite being framed as a cultural preservation effort, the release represents a major violation of Spotify’s terms of service and involves the large-scale distribution of copyrighted material.
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