A pirate library has claimed to have downloaded 86 million songs from Spotify, with plans to share them in torrents, Billboard has reported. According to the group, this represents 37% of Spotify’s catalog, but 99.6% of streams.
The first torrent released contains metadata (covers, titles and artists) for 99.9% of Spotify’s 256 million tracks, and the group plans to release the 300TB of music files later. Anna’s Archive – that’s what it calls itself – states that its goal is to create a musical preservation archive; In this first action, it has prioritized the most popular songs on Spotify.
Spotify, aware of the actions of Anna’s Archive, has suspended accounts that have participated in illegal downloads and implemented new security measures to prevent these types of attacks. Google has claimed to have recently removed 749 million links to Anna’s Archive domains over copyright claims.
But what is Anna’s Archive? It is an open source “shadow” library search engine (unofficial digital libraries), created by a person using the pseudonym Anna, and emerged after authorities attempted to close Z-Library in 2022.
The site collects information from various sources such as Z-Library, Sci-Hub or Library Genesis (LibGen). It describes itself as “the largest truly open library in human history,” and its goal is to catalog all existing books and make them available digitally to everyone. Now, he intends to extend this mission to music.
