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UPDATE 12/23: Spotify has shared more on the actions it has taken since discovering its service had been scraped for data. A spokesperson for Spotify told PCMag, “Spotify 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."
Original story 12/22: The world’s largest music streaming service has been scraped by a pirate activist group. According to a blog post from Anna’s Archive, it says it gained access to over 250 million pieces of metadata and millions of audio files from the streamer.
In a blog post titled "Backing up Spotify," Anna’s Archive explains how it believes it has built the “world’s first 'preservation archive' for music” through the move.
It says it has the metadata of 256 million tracks, plus the audio files for 86 million of those songs. The group says that represents 99.6% of Spotify listens.
Anna’s Archive released the metadata on its torrents website and says it plans to release audio files at a later date. That will be followed by more metadata and album artwork. It says it will be releasing the files in “order of popularity,” using Spotify’s own metrics to decide what to release first.
Spotify says it’s actively investigating the incident, confirming to Billboard that the data scraping took place.
A spokesperson for Spotify said, “An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.”
It's unclear what will come from the investigation, and whether Spotify was aware of the access before the group announced its plans on Dec. 20.
According to Anna's Archive, the files taken amount to around 300TB. It says the most popular songs are in a 160kbps quality, while less listened tracks have been shrunk to 75kbps.
The hacker group said, “For now this is a torrents-only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive.”
The group has become well known with its aim to preserve books, papers, magazines, and more through torrenting. It calls itself “the largest truly open library in human history," with access to over 61 million books and 95 million papers.
Anna's Archive explains how it saw a way to “build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation” once it realized how to scrape Spotify at scale. It says it aims to avoid major issues seen in other preservation tools, such as a typical focus on the most popular artists and some alternatives only working with high-quality audio files.