Anna’s Archive, the main open-source group for “open knowledge preservation” recently declared that she had succeeded in extracting music material from Spotify on a large scale, covering 256 million metadatas and about 86 million music files, and planned to release it in large seed slots through the P2P network, with a total capacity close to 300 TB, to attract the global music industry and the financial community.
According to Anna’s Archive’s official blog, the organization has found a way to “sizing Spotiffy data” as a rare opportunity to create a music library aimed at “the preservation of human music culture”.
Although the organization has focused mainly on books and academic thesis, its emphasis on preservation missions is “without any form of media”, and music is also part of human cultural assets.
Anna’s Archive indicates that the currently open database covers Spotify’s music from 2007 to July 2025, with a full version of about 86 million songs and almost a total listen to 99.6 per cent of the Spotify platform. It also provides a smaller archive of the most popular 10,000 songs of the Spotify platform, “This is the world’s largest open music relay database.”
In response to this, the Spotify representative, through a billboard report, stressed that the incident was not a “poaching” of the platform, but rather a “stream-ripping” by a third party, which had established a user account for long periods of time in violation of the platform’s usage terms, and had circumvented the DRM mechanism by illegal means, thereby gaining access to some of the audio files and public relays.
Spotify noted that the platform had identified and deactivated suspicious accounts involving unlawful extraction, and that new protection mechanisms had been put in place to respond to such anti-authorization attacks and to monitor anomalies on an ongoing basis.
Spotify also reiterated that, since its creation, it had been on the same front as artists and had worked with industry partners to actively protect the rights and interests of creators and combat piracy. Anna’s Archive had no official contact before the file was made public and the incident did not affect Spotify’s internal business system.
It is noteworthy that Anna’s Archive has been blocked in several countries for long-standing violations. Founded in 2022, Z-Library was seized by the United States Department of Justice, the organization consolidated several free online databases, including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and Internet Archive.
According to public sources, as of December of this year, Anna’s Archive had recorded more than 61 million books and 95 million academic papers and had been removed by Google from nearly 800 million search links as a result of a large number of requests from publishers.
At Anna’s Archive’s open Spotify data analysis, three of the most popular songs in the front of the Spotify platform are Birds of a Feather, Die with a Smile, and Bad Bunny’s DtMF. The total number of three songs is even higher than the total of tens of millions of songs in the post-platform section of the platform, highlighting the extreme concentration of the ecology of serial music.
