Anna's Archive, an open source search engine for shadow libraries, speaks it cleared the entire Spotify music library. The group obtained metadata for approximately 256 million tracks, including 86 million actual songs, totaling just under 300 TB in size.
“Some time ago we found a way to clean up Spotify on a large scale. We saw our role here in creating a music archive primarily aimed at preservation,” the group said in a statement. blog post. The pirate treasure trove of music represents over 15 million artists with over 58 million albums.
The group intends to make all files available for download to anyone with free disk space. “This scratch on Spotify is our humble attempt to create such a “preservation archive” of music. Of course, Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but this is a great start,” the band wrote. The 86 million songs the group has archived so far account for about 99.6 percent of streams on the platform. That's only about 37 percent of the total, and the group still has millions to archive.
The open source site typically focuses on texts, such as books and articles, which it says provide the highest density of information. The group says its goal to “preserve the knowledge and culture of humanity” does not differentiate between types of media. Of course, none of this is completely legal, and distributing or downloading all of these files is a gross violation of intellectual property laws.
The Anna Archive argues that current music collections, both physical and digital, are over-indexed by the most popular artists or consist of unreasonably large files due to collectors' focus on accuracy. The group claims to have compiled the largest publicly available database of music metadata. Music files will be released in stages in order of popularity.
“Spotify has identified and disabled nefarious user accounts that were engaging in illegal scraping,” an Engadget spokesperson said in a statement. “We have implemented new protections against copyright attacks like these and are actively monitoring suspicious behavior. We have stood with the artist community against piracy since day one and are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and protect their rights.”
Update December 22, 2025 10:45 pm ET.: This story has been updated to add a statement from Spotify.
