Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL;DR

• Anna’s Archive claims it has scraped almost all of Spotify.
• The archive includes metadata for 256 million tracks and audio for 86 million songs.
• The total size of the archive is nearly 300TB, being shared via torrents and organized by popularity.

Update: December 22, 2025 (8:45 PM ET): Spotify has shared an updated statement with Android Authority addressing Anna’s Archive’s claims of scraping the platform at scale. The platform says it has identified the user account used for the “unlawful” scraping. Here’s how the statement reads:

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. 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.

The company had previously told us that it had identified “that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.”

Spotify’s older statement stopped short of confirming the scale of the scraping described by Anna’s Archive. While the platform says only “some” of its audio files were accessed, Anna’s Archive claims it was able to archive music representing 99.6% of all listens on Spotify.

At this point, it’s unclear how much of the platform was actually affected or whether any legal action will be taken to remove the scraped data from torrents.

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Original article: December 21, 2025 (10:58 PM ET): Anna’s Archive, best known for backing up books and research papers, just pulled off something absolutely wild. It claims to have scraped almost the entirety of Spotify.

According to a new blog post, the group has archived metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files for 86 million songs, covering around 99.6% of all listens on Spotify. The full archive weighs in at just under 300TB and is being distributed via bulk torrents, sorted by popularity.

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If that sounds enormous, it is. Anna’s Archive says this is now the largest publicly available music metadata database in the world.

The group frames the project as a “preservation archive” for music. They argue that while popular songs are backed up well, huge chunks of lesser-known music could disappear if music streaming platforms pull the plug or lose licenses. They said Spotify is “a great start” for preserving modern music history.

The audio itself mostly comes straight from Spotify. Popular tracks are stored in their original 160kbps format, while less-played songs have been re-encoded into smaller files to save space. Anything released after July 2025 may be missing from the archive.

Right now, only metadata is fully available. The music files are being released gradually, starting with the most popular tracks.

No, this isn’t legal

Spotify licenses most of the music on its platform from record labels and rights holders under very strict legal terms. Mass-scraping audio files and redistributing them via torrents violates Spotify’s terms of service and copyright law in many countries.

Even if Anna’s Archive insists this is about preservation rather than piracy, copyright law generally doesn’t make exceptions for such “good intentions.”

It wouldn’t be surprising if Spotify and major record companies respond with takedown requests, legal threats, or worse. Whether they can actually put this archive back in the bottle is something we’ll have to wait and watch.

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