this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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339
Activist group says it has scraped 86m music files from Spotify (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.

Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.

A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86m music files from Spotify and 256m rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100m tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, said it had “identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping”.

“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,” said Spotify.

Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a “‘preservation archive’ for music”.

The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via “torrents”, a means of sharing large digital files online.

“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.

“With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts and other catastrophes,” said the group.

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[–] roserose56@lemmy.zip 16 points 14 hours ago

We only need 300TB iPod and we are done.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 31 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

... scraped 86m music files ... Spotify, which hosts more than 100m tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.

"Neener neener, you only got 86%!"

"It could have been worse."

"They didn't get everything, so we win!"

LLMs will at least be well trained in Newspeak.

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 10 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

According to the other article I read Spotify has about 256 million tracks. Not sure why guardian is saying over 100 million.

[–] msage@programming.dev 21 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Technically true

[–] blimthepixie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 17 hours ago

Technically correct is the best kind of correct 

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 5 points 20 hours ago

In the same way it's true that elon musk is a millionaire I guess lol.

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 6 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Is Anna's located in the US?

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Theoretically a node could be (since Anna's is decentralized and not consolidated), but in practice I think it's reasonable to believe none exists. The website's just accessible by US internet users and hosted somewhere outside the DMCA's grip.

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

That's what I was wondering about. If the American government can get to them.

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Probably not, but doesn't stop them from issuing the takedown request, I suppose.

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

If the servers are is China or Russia. I guess the takedowns are useless.

[–] verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Not located anywhere- the archive is mirrored all over the world.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Yeah, but it's still operated and organized by people, people who of they are within US jurisdiction be punished and made "an example of". Effectively killing the archive by cutting off its organization.

[–] bryndos@fedia.io 0 points 11 hours ago

Does "activist group" not have soulseek? smh

Honestly thou i don't really know what a spotify is, sounds like a dogging app.