Spotify has disabled multiple user accounts after an open-source group claimed it scraped and published millions of songs from the music streaming platform, the company confirmed on Monday.
Anna’s Archive, an organization that describes itself as the “largest truly open library in human history,” said over the weekend that it had discovered a method to scrape Spotify at scale. The group released a massive dataset containing metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files for around 86 million songs—representing nearly 99.6% of all music streams on Spotify.
In a statement to Recorded Future News, a Spotify spokesperson said the company had identified and disabled user accounts involved in what it described as “unlawful scraping.”
“We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior,” the spokesperson said. “Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy and continue to work with industry partners to protect creators.”
Spotify emphasized that the incident was not a hack of its internal systems. According to the company, the individuals behind the scrape violated Spotify’s terms of service by stream-ripping music over several months using third-party user accounts, rather than accessing Spotify’s business infrastructure.
Anna’s Archive said it did not contact Spotify before publishing the files. In a blog post, the group explained that while it traditionally focuses on preserving text-based material, it views music as an important part of humanity’s cultural heritage.
“Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text,” the organization wrote. “This is such a case.”
The released archive includes a bulk file of nearly 300 terabytes containing music uploaded to Spotify between 2007 and July 2025, as well as a smaller dataset featuring the platform’s top 10,000 most-streamed songs. Anna’s Archive claims the dataset is the largest publicly available music metadata collection to date.
The group also highlighted trends found in the data, noting that Spotify’s top three songs—Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” Lady Gaga’s “Die With a Smile,” and Bad Bunny’s “DtMF”—have more total streams than the bottom 20 to 100 million tracks combined.
Anna’s Archive has faced legal challenges in several countries due to repeated copyright violations. It emerged shortly after the 2022 law enforcement shutdown of Z-Library, whose operators were charged by the U.S. Justice Department. Since then, Anna’s Archive has aggregated content from multiple shadow libraries and claims to host over 61 million books and 95 million academic papers.
In November, Google reported removing nearly 800 million links to Anna’s Archive following copyright takedown requests from publishers.
The latest incident raises renewed concerns about digital piracy, data scraping, and the protection of artists’ rights in the era of large-scale online platforms.