Spotify has moved quickly to contain a strange and unsettling breach after a self described ‘pirate activist group’ scraped large chunks of its music library, framing the act as cultural ‘preservation’ rather than outright piracy.
Reports surfaced early on Monday (December 22nd) claiming that metadata from Spotify’s catalogue had been harvested and exposed publicly.
An open source search engine called Anna’s Archive was among the first to highlight the breach, positioning itself as the ‘largest truly open library in human history’ and arguing that its actions were about archiving, not theft.
Spotify didn’t see it that way.
Within hours of the reports going live, the streaming giant confirmed it had identified and shut down the accounts responsible.
‘Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,’ a spokesperson said in a statement provided to Euronews Next. ‘We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior.’
According to Spotify, the only user related data involved was tied to public playlists, with no private user information compromised.
What Was Taken
Anna’s Archive claims access to 86 million Spotify tracks, a fraction of the platform’s estimated 256 million song catalogue, while no audio files have been publicly released yet, the scraped data reportedly includes metadata and album artwork.
At this stage, only metadata has surfaced, the group has openly stated that the actual music files and artwork may be released via torrent at a later date.
Why the Metadata Matters
Anna’s Archive has already begun publishing insights drawn from the data, among the claims:
- Album releases jumped from eight million in 2023 to nearly 10.5 million in 2024
- Opera allegedly has the highest number of artists on Spotify
- Most full length albums contain 10 tracks
- Nearly two million albums appear to be duplicated due to licensing or reissues
- Songs are most commonly written in the key of C
Despite representing less than 40 percent of Spotify’s total catalogue, the scraped tracks reportedly account for 99.6 percent of all listens.
Bad Timing for Spotify
The incident lands during a turbulent year for the platform, this year alone, at least nine rock and metal bands have pulled their music from Spotify, including King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and My Bloody Valentine.
Between artist exits and now a large scale scraping attempt, Spotify’s grip on its library is under sharper scrutiny than ever.
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