Pirate activists hacked Spotify’s library: they stole data on 86 million tracks

Pirate activists hacked Spotify’s library: they stole data on 86 million tracks

The pirate group Anna’s Archive, known for creating the largest open library of books, announced that it had successfully scraped Spotify’s library. Activists claim to have gained access to 86 million audio files and hundreds of millions of lines of metadata.

Spotify has already confirmed the incident.

Details of the leak

• According to a post on the Anna’s Archive blog, the attackers plan to distribute a data set totaling about 300 terabytes via torrents.

• It includes 256 million lines of metadata (track names, artists, albums) and 86 million audio files obtained by bypassing DRM protection.

• As of December 22, only the metadata database has been made public, while the files themselves are being prepared for release on P2P networks.

Spotify’s position and technical aspects

In a comment to Billboard, Spotify representatives noted that the investigation revealed the use of “illegal tactics to circumvent DRM” by third parties. The company is currently trying to determine the full extent of the vulnerability.

Market experts, including Yoav Zimmerman (CEO of startup Third Chair), note that this precedent could change the rules of the game. While MusicBrainz (about 5 million tracks) was previously considered the largest open music archive, Anna’s Archive is 17 times larger in volume.

According to Zimmerman, this theoretically allows any user to create their “own free version of Spotify” on a home server such as Plex, where the only obstacle would be copyright law.

Why do activists need this?

Representatives of Anna’s Archive position their actions as an act of “preserving human culture.”

They argue that digital platforms are not a reliable place for long-term storage of knowledge, so creating a decentralized archive is necessary for history.

Read more: Spotify acquires WhoSampled along with its team and music database