‘Anti-copyright extremists’ allegedly scrapes Spotify’s library

Spotify has launched new protections against “anti-copyright attacks” after the open-source library pirate activist group Anna’s Archive has announced to have ripped off 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents. According to the group, it has archived around 86 million songs from Spotify, ordering by popularity descending. While this only represents 37 percent of songs, it represents around 99.6 percent of listens.

“We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity,” claimed a blog post from the site. “This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.

“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.”

In theory, anyone could use this archive to build their own Spotify clone.

Spotify’s investigations continue, including into what exactly has been accessed by the activists, and how. Accoding to Spotify, this isn’t a leak or a security breach with implications for users, note. The activists are currently thought to have used Spotify’s public web API to scrape the metadata.

Spotify has provided a statement in relation to this story - “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour,” said its spokesperson. “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.”