Spotify says it is cutting off access to some user accounts and adding protections after a shadow library website claimed to have removed 99.6% of Spotify’s metadata and audio files from the streaming service’s music library.
On December 20, the website Anna’s Archive said in a blog post that it was distributing 300 terabytes of data for 256 million music tracks scraped from Spotify. It published 99.6 million music files from the service, or 86 million music files of the most popular songs. The blog post talks about a preservation effort and says it plans to allow individual files to be uploaded in the future. The message also called for donations to Anna’s archives.
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Spotify responded, saying it was investigating the scraping and taking action against Anna’s Archive. “Spotify identified and disabled harmful user accounts that were engaging in illegal scraping,” a spokesperson told CNET in an email.
“We have implemented new protections against these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring suspicious behavior. Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy and actively work with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights,” the spokesperson said.
In its blog post, Anna’s Archive said that torrenting the metadata was just the first step in its plans for the collected Spotify data. He said the release of music files, in order of popularity on Spotify, would be next, followed by additional file metadata, album art and patch files to reconstruct Spotify’s original files. “This is by far the largest publicly available database of music metadata,” the blog states.
