Despite an unfathomable $13 trillion lawsuit, Anna’s Archive has started quietly releasing millions of tracks scraped from Spotify.
Users on social media noticed that torrents containing over 2.8 million audio files have been released by Anna’s Archive, a major shadow digital library that recently announced it had “backed up Spotify.”
The audio tracks allegedly span over 47 torrents, totalling 6.4 terabytes of data.
“They seem to have 1 seeder at very slow speeds right now, but I can confirm that the hash of the 4 files I could download matched the hash from the metadata database they published,” a Redditor posted in a DataHoarder community.
Torrentfreak.com confirmed that the newly released torrents actually contain music files, ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to several megabytes, and they come with embedded media information and metadata, such as song, album, artist, publisher, and, where applicable, the cover art.
However, it appears the release includes only some of the least popular scraped tracks, labeled with the “pop_0” tag. Spotify’s algorithm assigns tracks a popularity metric ranging from 0 to 100, based on the total number of streams and the recency of those plays.
The release is a small part of the claimed 300TB music scrape of 86 million tracks, representing 99.6% of listens on Spotify.
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Anna’s Archive previously stated in a blog post that the data would be released in stages.
The library has already released a 200GB torrent file containing the metadata database, covering 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs (International Standard Recording Codes).
Spotify confirmed that it identified and disabled “the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping.”
Later, the streaming giant, alongside major record labels, filed a $13 trillion lawsuit against the unknown library’s operators.
Spotify’s $10 billion in payments to the music industry in 2024 pale in comparison to this massive figure. The calculation comes from the legal maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work.
“This action arises out of the brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings by a group of anonymous internet pirates with no regard for the law,” the complaint reads.
The claimants obtained a court order requiring domain registries to disable several of Anna’s Archive’s domains, including .org.
Reacting to the lawsuit, the shadow library had temporarily removed its dedicated Spotify download section and marked it as unavailable until further notice. However, no public comments were made since.
The pirates are facing another roadblock that limits the decentralization of data sharing – the silicon squeeze caused by AI companies.
“I cannot believe a 6TB HDD costs $260 where I live right now,” one of the Redditors noted.
And at least 50 such drives would be needed to store the entire scraped music archive.
With RAM and storage prices skyrocketing, Jeff Bezos warned that the PC is becoming a museum piece and its days are numbered.
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