Anna’s Archive Claims 300TB Spotify Mirror, Forcing an Investigation Into a Massive Music Data Leak

The shadow library Anna’s Archive has claimed that it carried out a large-scale “mirror” of Spotify’s music catalog and intends to distribute it via torrents totalling roughly 300 terabytes. Spotify has said it is investigating the incident and assessing how far any unauthorised access may have gone.

According to Anna’s Archive, the initiative is framed as a “music preservation archive,” and the group claims to have collected 86 million of the most in-demand tracks, which it says account for approximately 99.6% of all listens on Spotify. A first step, the group says, is a standalone torrent containing a metadata database covering roughly 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRC codes used by the industry to identify recordings.

Spotify has confirmed the investigation and outlined that a third party harvested publicly available metadata and then employed illicit techniques to bypass DRM to access a portion of the audio files. The article notes that such activity bears the legal hallmarks of mass data extraction and distribution of protected content, potentially violating Spotify’s terms of service and copyright law.