Shadow ‘Archive’ Says It Copied Virtually All of Spotify’s Music - Decrypt

In brief Shadow library Anna's Archive has "backed up Spotify," scraping 86 million audio files amounting to 300TB of data. The group claims to be building a "music archive primarily aimed at preservation." Data reveal that Electronic/Dance is the largest genre category by artist count, followed by Rock and World/Traditional. Anna's Archive , the shadow library best known for making pirated ebooks and academic papers searchable, announced this weekend what might be the largest music piracy operation in history: "We backed up Spotify." The group claims it scraped 86 million audio files from Spotify, representing 99.6% of everything people actually listen to on the platform. Total size: just under 300 terabytes, distributed through bulk torrents. Spotify isn't happy. A spokesperson told Billboard that "a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform's audio files." Note the careful wording there: "some" audio files. Anna's Archive says 86 million. Spotify isn't confirming the scale. The company also called the group "anti-copyright extremists" who had previously pirated content from YouTube. So, aside from ripping off Spotify-and the recording artists, whose income is predominantly derived from royalty payments-what exactly did they get? The folks at Anna's Archive scraped and archived Spotify. It will be distributed in bulk torrents over the coming month. "With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes" pic.twitter.com/Ez2pf8GoJS - Chicago Commune (@chicago_commune) December 21, 2025 The numbers Anna's Archive claims metadata for 99% of Spotify’s library of 256 million tracks, including audio files for the 86 million songs that actually matter-the ones people play. The metadata database alone contains 186 million unique ISRCs (International Standard Recording Codes). For comparison, MusicBrainz , the largest legal open music database, has about 5 million. Anna's Archive just built something 37 times bigger. Popular tracks were preserved in their original OGG Vorbis format at 160 kilobits per second-no re-encoding, no quality loss. Less popular stuff got compressed to OGG Opus at 75 kbps to save space. The group used Spotify's own popularity metric to prioritize what to grab first, focusing on tracks with popularity scores above zero. Over 70% of Spotify's 256 million tracks have a popularity score of exactly zero. Nobody listens to them. The top 10,000 songs span popularity scores of 70-100. Only about 210,000 songs-roughly 0.1% of the catalog-have a popularity score of 50 or higher. Those 0.1% account for the vast majority of all listening activity. The top three songs on Spotify right now? Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars's "Die With A Smile" (3.07 billion streams), Billie Eilish's "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" (3.13 billion), and Bad Bunny's "DtMF" (1.12 billion). Those three tracks alone have more total plays than the bottom 20 to 100 million songs combined. In other words, Spotify is mostly a graveyard of songs nobody will ever hear. The group decided not to archive that graveyard (the full catalog)-it would have required an additional 700...

Preview: ~500 words