Spotify cracks down on unlawful scraping of 86 million songs

Spotify shut down user accounts after an open‑source group, Anna’s Archive, scraped 86 million songs from its library and published a database of tracks and metadata, with Spotify confirming it identified and disabled the involved accounts. The group said it found a method to extract Spotify files and released metadata for 256 million tracks and 86 million audio files, representing around 99.6 percent of listens, with the files dating from 2007 to 2025.

Spotify stated that unauthorized access occurred when a third party bypassed DRM to scrape audio files and that new safeguards have been implemented to monitor for suspicious behaviour. According to Euronews Next, the spokesperson said Spotify identified and disabled the nefarious accounts and that no non‑public user data was compromised, aside from public playlist information. Hacktivists claimed nearly 300TB was scraped and shared via torrents, though Spotify did not disclose the full volume of scraped data.

The open‑source project, described as a shadow‑library search engine and archival effort, launched in 2022 and operates by indexing content from multiple shadow libraries such as Z‑Library, LibGen, and Sci‑Hub.