A pirate activist group has reportedly scraped and released all of Spotify’s music, according to a blog post on Anna’s Archive.
The breach includes 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files, which are being shared on P2P networks in bulk torrents totaling roughly 300 terabytes.
“This is insane,” Yoav Zimmerman, CEO/co-founder of Third Chair, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
He added, “Anyone can now, in theory, create their own personal free version of Spotify (all music up to 2025) with enough storage and a personal media streaming server like Plex. The only real barriers are copyright law and fear of enforcement.”
Zimmerman, whose startup uses AI to build legal tools for media companies, noted that the leak dwarfs the largest previously available open music archive, MusicBrainz, which contains around five million unique tracks.
Anna’s Archive, which typically focuses on books and papers, said the project is part of its mission of “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture” and described the Spotify scrape as an effort to “build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.”
The post added, “Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.”
Billboard has reached out to Spotify for comment.
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