Pirate library rips 86 million of the most popular songs on Spotify

Spotify says it has launched new protections against “anti-copyright attacks” after the open-source library / pirate activist group Anna’s Archive announced it’s ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents, as reported earlier by Billboard. According to the group, “We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify, ordering by popularity descending. While this only represents 37 percent of songs, it represents around 99.6 percent of listens.”

The first torrent released says it contains metadata, such as album art, song title, and artist name, belonging to 99.9 percent of Spotify’s 256 million tracks. The group says it plans to make the 300TB worth of music files available at a later date.

Anna’s Archive, which describes itself as “the world’s largest shadow library,” says it “backed up Spotify” as part of an attempt to create a “preservation archive” for music using Spotify’s “popularity” metric to determine which tracks to download first. It says the metadata reveals information like which genre has the most tracks (Electronic/Dance, with 520,075), and that 120BPM is the most popular tempo.

Though Anna’s Archive primarily focuses on backing up books and research documents, its blog post says it “discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.” Last month, Google said it removed 749 million links to Anna’s Archive domains from its search engine due to copyright complaints, as reported by TorrentFreak.

In a statement to The Verge, Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey said the company “has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts engaged in unlawful scraping.”

Spotify’s full statement, from Batey:

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.