Spotify has spoken out against a “nefarious” group that has scraped the library of the streaming service.
Billboard reported that a blog post on open-source search engine Anna’s Archive drew attention to an incident where an activist piracy group had scraped “256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files, to be distributed on P2P networks in bulk torrents totalling roughly 300 terabytes.”
Anna’s Archive primarily shares books and papers, and denies claims of piracy given that it does not directly host any files. Currently the website is not accessible in the UK. The post said the scrape is part of its mission of “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture” and “build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.”
A spokesman for the music streaming service told Billboard: “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 behaviour. 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.”
While it is an industry leader with over 700million active users, Spotify has come under scrutiny in recent weeks due to payments made to artists on the service. In a post styled after the Spotify Wrapped campaign, the band Los Campesinos! revealed how much they made from streaming in 2025, including how much each individual streaming service pays.
Meanwhile, a campaign titled Spotify Unwrapped called for a boycott of the service over AI music and ads for ICE being found on the app. It was launched by three grassroots organisations who were behind the No Kings protests in the US earlier this year – 5050 Movement, Indivisible Project and Working Families.