Pirate site Anna’s Archive, which describes itself as “the largest truly open library in human history,” says that it has scraped 99.6% of all the music people listen to from Spotify.
It says the total data downloaded is a little under 300TB in size and that it will be making this available for torrenting …
The site euphemistically describes its download as a “backup” of Spotify.
We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files) […] Anna’s Archive normally focuses on text (e.g. books and papers) […] but our mission (preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture) doesn’t distinguish among media types. Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.
Technically, the site has only captured a third of Spotify’s 256M tracks. However, it says that the 86M tracks it has downloaded represent almost all of the music people actually listen to.
We archived around 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens. It’s a little under 300TB in total size. We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks […] For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform.
The site has also begun analysing the data and sharing its findings. For example, it says that the three most popular songs have a higher total stream count than the bottom 100 million songs combined.
Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars Die With A Smile 3.075B streams Billie Eilish Birds of a Feather 3.137B streams Bad Bunny DtMF 1.124B streams
Spotify told Engadget it has now disabled the accounts responsible for the scraping, although this does seem to be a clear example of closing the stable door after the horse has galloped off into the sunset with a large collection of hard drives in its saddlebags.
“Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” a spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. “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.”
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