Spotify responded on Monday to an open-source group’s decision to publish files over the weekend containing 86 million tracks scraped from the music streaming platform. 

Anna's Archive, which calls itself the “largest truly open library in human history,” said on Saturday that it discovered a way to scrape Spotify’s files and subsequently released a database of metadata and songs. 

A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it “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 behavior,” the spokesperson said. “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." 

The spokesperson added that Anna’s Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a “hack” of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify’s terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said.

They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify’s business systems, they added. 

Anna’s Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture “doesn’t distinguish among media types.” 

“Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation,” they said.

“This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a ‘preservation archive’ for music. Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.”

While the full release contains a music metadata database with 256 million tracks, Anna’s Archive put together a bulk file a little under 300 terabytes in size featuring 86 million music files that account for about 99.6% of all listens on Spotify. There is another smaller file featuring the top 10,000 most popular songs.

The files cover all music posted on Spotify from 2007 to July 2025. Anna’s Archive called it “by far the largest music metadata database that is publicly available.”

“With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes,” the organization said.

The blog post outlines distinct trends from Spotify data. The top three songs on Spotify — Billie Eilish's “Birds of a Feather,” Lady Gaga's “Die with a Smile” and Bad Bunny's “DtMF” — have a higher total stream count than the bottom 20-100 million songs combined.

Anna’s Archive, which is banned in several countries for its repeated copyright violations, was created in the wake of the law enforcement shutdown of Z-Library in 2022. The Justice Department arrested and charged two Russian nationals in 2022 for running Z-Library, which at the time was “the world’s largest library” and claimed to have at least 11 million e-books for download.

Anna's Archive emerged days after Z-Library was shut down and aggregated records from that site as well as several other free online libraries like the Internet Archive, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. 

As of December, Anna's Archive has more than 61 million books and 95 million papers. Copyright holders in multiple countries have tried to sue the organization, and Google in November said it removed nearly 800 million links to Anna's Archive from its search engine after publishers issued takedown requests.