According to Anna’s Archive, their project is focused on "preserving music," and the team has gathered 86 million of the most popular tracks, covering approximately 99.6% of all listens on Spotify. Priority was given to compositions that are considered the most in demand. In the first phase, they have already released a torrent with metadata that includes information about approximately 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRC codes used to identify recordings in the music industry.
Spotify has confirmed that an investigation is underway and explained that a third party collected public metadata and used illegal methods to bypass DRM, which gave them access to some audio files. However, Spotify emphasizes that it does not confirm the volumes mentioned by Anna’s Archive and notes that it only concerns "some" audio files.
Particular interest lies in the statistics that the pirate group publishes alongside the announcement. Each track on Spotify has a "popularity" score from 0 to 100, calculated based on the number of listens and their relevance. Anna’s Archive claims that this parameter helped them determine priorities for downloading and select the most significant tracks for preservation.
It is said that for tracks with a popularity above zero, almost all were preserved in their original quality from Spotify (OGG Vorbis at about 160 kbps). Less popular recordings, which account for about half of all listens, were re-encoded to OGG Opus at approximately 75 kbps to reduce the overall size of the archive. The group also acknowledges that the "long tail" of the catalog with zero popularity was hardly touched, as such tracks account for only a small fraction of listens, and among them, there is a lot of questionable content, including hard-to-filter AI-generated material.
Despite the project being positioned as "preserving cultural heritage," its legal aspect resembles a classic story of mass data extraction and subsequent distribution of protected content.
This behavior likely violates the terms of service and copyright laws, which could lead to demands for the removal of torrents and more stringent actions from rights holders. Furthermore, such a massive collection of music and metadata could potentially serve as a basis for creating alternative pirate streaming services or be used for training models, similar to how "shadow" collections of books have already become a subject of disputes regarding AI and author consent.
