Pirates descend on Spotify’s entire library

Niv Bavarsky

The world’s biggest music streaming service got scraped like bare knees on asphalt. A pirate activist group called Anna’s Archive allegedly pulled 300 terabytes of data from Spotify, creating what might be the largest open-music database ever, Billboard reported on Sunday. According to a blog post from the anonymous group: The scrape includes ~99.6% of songs that actually receive listens on Spotify (about 86 million tunes). It also swiped metadata (e.g., album art and song titles) from 99.9% of Spotify’s 256 million total tracks. The metadata has been released, with music files to follow soon. Spotify said in a statement that it “disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” “implemented new safeguards,” and is “actively monitoring for suspicious behavior.” Anna’s Archive is a shadow library, aka an online database of pirated content, with a stated mission of “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture.” It referred to the Spotify scrape as an attempt to start preserving music, after having mainly targeted books and academic papers before. But…the data dump is likely also a big win for AI developers, as long as they don’t get caught using it. This year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion after a federal judge found that it wrongfully acquired pirated books to train its chatbots.—ML