A well-known online preservation group, Anna's Archive, has made a bold claim: they say they successfully scraped and backed up Spotify's entire music platform, including both metadata (song info, artists, albums, playlists, etc.) and actual music files.
According to them, this isn't just a small data grab. They're talking about:
In short, they're positioning this as the world's first open "preservation archive" for music, aiming to protect music history from disappearing due to licensing changes, platform shutdowns, or other disasters
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Why They Say They Did It
Anna's Archive is usually known for preserving books, academic papers, and text-based knowledge. But they argue that music is also cultural knowledge and deserves preservation.
Their main points:
So when they found a way to extract Spotify's content at scale, they decided to do it.
What Exactly Did They Back Up?
Let's break it down simply.
Song Metadata
They say they have:
- Artist info
- Album info
- Track details
- Popularity metrics
- Playlists
- Audio features (tempo, loudness, energy, etc.)
Basically, all the data you see when browsing Spotify.
The Music Files
They claim to have archived:
- Most of the songs people actually listen to
- Stored in torrents
- Grouped based on popularity
Quality-wise:
- Popular songs: original Spotify-quality OGG files
- Lesser-played songs: compressed to smaller size to save space
- Some songs not included due to extremely low relevance, duplication, or being AI spam
How Big Is This?
Huge. Truly huge.
- Metadata alone: almost 200GB compressed
- Audio analysis data: 4TB
- Music files: nearly 300TB
- Total project: one of the largest music datasets ever released publicly
They're releasing it gradually via torrents so people can help "seed" and mirror it.
Does Spotify Really Have That Much Music?
Yes. According to their numbers:
- Spotify hosts around 256 million tracks
- More than 70% of tracks barely get streamed at all
- Only 0.1% of songs get the majority of global listening
So their archive prioritizes music people actually listen to.
But Let's Be Real…
This is extremely controversial.
This isn't just "backing up" — this is scraping a massive commercial streaming service, including copyrighted works, and distributing it openly. It raises:
Spotify has not (at the time of writing) publicly commented in the source article, but this is the kind of thing that usually attracts massive legal action.
What This Means in Simple Terms
If their claims are true:
Someone may now hold:
Whether you see it as piracy, activism, preservation, or something in between… it is definitely one of the biggest digital music data events we've seen in years.
Final Thoughts
This situation highlights a bigger discussion:
Whether heroically noble or legally dangerous — this is a massive move and definitely one of the most fascinating tech and culture developments in the streaming era.
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