Hacktivists claim near-total Spotify music scrape

Hacktivist group Anna’s Archive claims to have scraped almost all of Spotify’s catalog and is seeding it via BitTorrent, turning the streaming platform into a roughly 300 TB pirate “preservation archive.” The group’s blog states that they scraped metadata for around 256 million tracks and audio files for roughly 86 million songs, totaling close to 300 TB, which reportedly represents about 99.9% of Spotify’s catalog and roughly 99.6% of all streams.

According to the group, this work was undertaken at scale to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation. Spotify says it has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping and has implemented new safeguards. From a security perspective, the incident is described as a textbook example of how scraping can escalate beyond metadata into industrial‑scale content theft, using public APIs, token abuse, rate‑limit evasion, and DRM bypass techniques.

There is currently no indication that passwords, payment details, or private playlists were exposed, with the incident focused on content and metadata rather than user databases. 23 December 2025.