Cutting corners: A massive pirate archive has surfaced that appears to contain nearly every song ever streamed on Spotify, along with data covering almost the platform's entire catalog. The breach could represent the largest music piracy event in history – and while Spotify has rushed to close the loophole that enabled it, it remains unclear whether the archive can be contained or taken down at all.
Anna's Archive, a shadow library search engine, recently scraped Spotify to create a pirate archive containing 86 million songs and metadata for 256 million tracks.
The activist group, which claims to follow in the footsteps of shadow libraries such as Z-Library to preserve information and increase its availability, stated that the archive contains almost everything streamed on Spotify up to July 2025. The metadata for 256 million songs represents 99.9% of the streaming service's entire selection, and the 86 million audio files comprise 99.6% of all streams. Anna's Archive encoded much of the music in 160kbps OGG format, but less popular tracks are only available in 70kbps.
Currently, the nearly 300TB torrent only contains the metadata. Anna's Archive plans to eventually release additional metadata along with the music files, album art, and files necessary for reconstructing the original tracks. Although the group has only released a bulk torrent for preservation, it is considering enabling individual song downloads.
Spotify confirmed the hack to outlets without specifying its scope. The company banned an account connected to the incident and closed the loophole Anna's Archive used to scrape the library.
After analyzing the trove, the activist group published intriguing insights about Spotify, including the distribution of genres and popularity among songs. For example, much of what Anna's Archive downloaded appears to be AI-generated, confirming the technology's growing presence on the platform.
AI-generated tracks might be behind the significant acceleration of new album releases that occurred after 2019. Around 2 million albums debuted that year, but the service added over 10 million in 2023. Moreover, the fact that the 86 million audio files the group scraped represent nearly all streams but comprise only one-third of Spotify's total library suggests that most of it goes completely ignored.
According to the hackers, at least 70 percent of songs on Spotify have never been streamed. The top three songs have received more streams than the bottom 20 to 100 million songs combined. Furthermore, approximately 34 million songs are explicit, many songs have multiple versions, and most tracks on Spotify are singles.
A 300TB pirate archive claims to contain nearly every song ever streamed on Spotify
