Anna’s Archive, a pirate group and open source engine for shadow libraries, recently said that it has successfully ripped Spotify’s entire music library. The group says that the metadata comes up to around 256 million tracks, with 86 million songs, or to put it in another way, just under 300TB in size.
“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. Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved. There are many music enthusiasts in the world who digitised their CD and LP collections, shared them through torrents or other digital means, and meticulously catalogued them.”
To be fair, Anna’s Archive claim of having downloaded the entire library may not be accurate; as time goes by, and artists release new songs, the library for streaming services like Spotify will only continue to grow and accumulate tracks and songs.
In any case, the group plans on making all the songs it ripped from Spotify available for download, provided that folks have the storage capacity for the library. The group also says that its intention is noble, and that it is doing this in order to start a “presevation archive” for music. “This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a “preservation archive” for music. Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” the group wrote.
Spotify Obviously Isn’t Happy
To no one’s surprise, Spotify is far from happy, livid even, and has responded to Anna’s Archive’s scraping claim. In a statement to Engadget, it says that it is 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.”
(Source: Anna’s Archive, Engadget)
