Spotify Says 'Anti-Copyright Extremists' Scraped Its Library

A group of activists has scraped Spotify's entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna's Archive, a search engine for 'shadow libraries' that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as 'anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms' and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The activists claim this represents 'the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open' and covers 'around 99.6% of listens.'

They appear to have used Spotify's public web API to scrape the metadata and circumvented DRM to access audio files. Spotify insists that this is not a security breach affecting user data. Though the more pressing concern for the music industry may be AI training rather than pirate streaming services -- similar YouTube datasets have reportedly been used by unlicensed generative AI music services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.