Music streaming giant Spotify has confirmed a significant data breach after an activist group illegally copied and released metadata for tens of millions of songs from its platform.
The 'Shadow Library' Strikes Music
The group behind the massive scrape is Anna's Archive, a so-called 'shadow library' already blocked in the UK. Known for copying over 60 million books and nearly 100 million academic papers, the organisation has now turned its focus to music. In a long blog post published on December 23, 2025, the activists justified the theft as a 'humble attempt' to create a preservation archive for humanity's musical heritage.
They claimed the action protects music from potential destruction by natural disasters, wars, or corporate budget cuts. While they accessed around 37% of Spotify's total catalogue, they assert this represents 99.6% of the music actually listened to on the service.
How the Vast Archive Will Be Released
The group states it has copied nearly every track listened to on Spotify. The release will be conducted via torrent files, prioritised by popularity. Metadata for 256 million tracks has already been made available, with the music files themselves to follow.
Initially, individual tracks will not be available for separate download. Instead, they will be released as part of large bundles, aligning with the stated archival goal. However, the blog writer hinted that could change, saying, 'if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive'.
The scale is monumental. The group estimates the bulk torrents will amount to a staggering 300 terabytes of data. To put that in perspective, you would need the storage equivalent of 20,000 Gmail accounts to hold it all.
Industry Backlash and AI Training Fears
The breach has raised immediate alarm within the music industry and among copyright advocates. A primary concern is that the vast, freely available dataset of copyrighted music could be used to train artificial intelligence models without permission or compensation—a hotly debated ethical issue.
Ed Newton-Rex, a campaigner for artists' rights, reshared a post on X featuring a sly-looking cat, captioned: 'AI companies seeing 300TB of music “archived” publicly'.
In response to the incident, a Spotify spokesperson stated: 'Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior.'
The company reinforced its stance against piracy, adding: 'Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.'
