In recent days, alarming headlines have suggested that Spotify suffered a massive hack in which 86 million music files were stolen and that as much as 300 terabytes of data could soon be leaked online. The claims, amplified across social media and tech forums, have raised fears among users, artists, and of course in the global music industry. But what actually happened is more complex than a conventional hack or cyberattack.
The controversy stems from claims made by Anna’s Archive, a self-described digital preservation and piracy-activist collective. The group announced that it had scraped a massive portion of Spotify’s music catalog, including:
– Around 86 million audio files
– Metadata for over 250 million tracks
– An estimated 300TB dataset in total
According to the group, the effort was carried out under the banner of “cultural preservation” arguing that streaming platforms control access to music that could disappear or be altered over time.
That’s more than 99.6% of what we listen on Spotify said Anna’s Archive, explaining they used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks.
Despite the language used in many viral posts, there is no evidence of a traditional hack or security breach of Spotify’s internal systems. Spotify has clarified that:
– Its backend infrastructure was not compromised
– No user data (emails, passwords, playlists, payment details) was accessed
– The incident did not involve unauthorized access to Spotify servers
Instead, the activity appears to have involved large-scale automated scraping — a process that downloads content by abusing normal user access, bots, or third-party tools rather than exploiting a security vulnerability.
In short: This was scraping, not hacking. Or as Anna’s Archive mentionned on their website:
“We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.“
📷 : Photo Credit / Kegfire Envato Elements License
Anna’s Archive is a non-profit, open-source shadow-library project best known for indexing and preserving text-based knowledge, such as books and academic papers, because text offers the highest information density and long-term cultural value. Built as a meta-search engine that aggregates content from multiple large digital libraries rather than hosting most files itself, the project frames its mission as safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture from loss, censorship, or paywalls.
Although it presents its work as cultural preservation and the promotion of open access, rights holders and regulators largely regard Anna’s Archive’s activities as copyright violations, leading to widespread site blocking, extensive takedown demands, and the risk of legal action from publishers and government authorities.
📷 : Cover Photo Credit / LightFieldStudios Envato Elements License
