The world’s largest shadow library—which is increasingly funded by AI developers—shocked the Internet this weekend by announcing it had “backed up Spotify” and started distributing 300 terabytes of metadata and music files in bulk torrents.
According to Anna’s Archive, the data grab represents more than 99 percent of listens on Spotify, making it “the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks.” It’s also “the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music which is fully open,” with 86 million music files, the archive boasted.
The music files supposedly represent about 37 percent of songs available on Spotify as of July 2025. The scraped files were prioritized by popularity, with Anna’s Archive weeding out many songs that are never streamed or are of poor quality, such as AI-generated songs.
Spotify did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment. But the music streaming giant told Android Authority on Monday that it was investigating whether Anna’s Archive had actually scraped its platform “at scale,” as its blog claimed.
“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,” Spotify said. “We are actively investigating the incident.”
It’s unclear how much Spotify data was actually scraped, Android Authority noted, or if the company will possibly pursue legal action to take down the torrents.
For Anna’s Archive, the temptation to scrape the data may have been too much after stumbling upon “a way to scrape Spotify at scale,” supposedly “a while ago.”
“We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation,” the archive said. Scraping Spotify data was a “great start,” they said, toward building an “authoritative list of torrents aiming to represent all music ever produced.”