Anna’s Archive, a non-profit meta-search engine, has announced the acquisition of an impressive 86 million songs and metadata for 256 million compositions sourced from the streaming giant Spotify. This initiative is part of a broader project aimed at creating a global music archive.
The Origins of Anna’s Archive
Founded by a collective of anonymous archivists known as the Pirate Library Mirror, Anna’s Archive emerged as a response to law enforcement efforts to shut down Z-Library in 2022. The organization is widely recognized for its commitment to preserving books and scholarly works, with the overarching goal of making digital content accessible to the public. This mission seeks to safeguard humanity’s knowledge and cultural heritage.
Despite facing hundreds of millions of takedown requests from copyright holders, Anna’s Archive has established itself as one of the most popular platforms for the pirated distribution of content online. The site remains accessible through mirrors and alternative domains, continuing its mission unabated.
Data Collection from Spotify
The project related to Spotify was initiated after hackers discovered a method for large-scale data collection from the platform. The team behind Anna’s Archive asserts that while music has been well-preserved through CDs, vinyl digitization, and private torrent communities, existing initiatives often prioritize well-known artists and high-quality formats. This approach, they argue, exacerbates storage demands and risks marginalizing lesser-known music, which may become lost over time.
According to the organization, while Spotify does not encompass all music ever created, it serves as an excellent starting point for establishing a centralized archive. Anna’s Archive has preserved tracks of moderate popularity in their original Spotify OGG Vorbis format at a bitrate of 160 kbps, while more popular songs have been transcoded into smaller OGG Opus files at a bitrate of 75 kbps to reduce storage requirements. The archive prioritizes content based on an internal popularity metric, highlighting the scale of its metadata collection, which includes 186 million unique ISRC codes—significantly surpassing existing public databases like MusicBrainz.
Current Status and Future Plans
As of now, Anna’s Archive has only released metadata. The first torrent file comprises 199.9 GB of compressed metadata concerning artists, albums, and tracks, currently accessible to over 200 users. The distribution of music files will commence gradually, starting with the most popular tracks. In subsequent phases, the project plans to include album covers and patch files to restore original sound quality.
Spotify has acknowledged the incident and confirmed that it has launched an investigation into unauthorized access to its platform. The company reported identifying a third party that collected publicly available metadata and employed illegal methods to bypass DRM protections to access certain audio files. A representative from Spotify stated that the company has blocked accounts involved in data scraping and implemented new security measures to prevent similar attacks in the future.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
While Anna’s Archive positions its activities as a means of preserving cultural heritage, the legal foundation of its operations raises significant questions. Spotify licenses music under strict agreements with record labels and copyright holders. The mass extraction and distribution of audio files via torrent trackers would constitute a violation of both Spotify’s terms of service and copyright law in many jurisdictions.
