Spotify responds to claims of 300TB data grab from piracy-linked site

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Spotify is looking into reports that a group involved in online piracy has obtained millions of songs and other information from its service without permission.

I was reading a blog post from Anna’s Archive – you know, the group that’s amazing at preserving books and research – and they made a pretty incredible claim! They said they’ve collected information on around 256 million songs and actually saved audio files for about 86 million of them. Apparently, that covers 99.6% of everything people listen to on Spotify – that’s huge!

The dataset is almost 300TB in size and is being shared through torrents, organized from most to least popular.

Following widespread reporting, Spotify has now publicly acknowledged the situation.

Spotify investigating illegal music copying

So, I just saw a report that Spotify is looking into some unauthorized access stuff. Basically, someone might have gotten in where they shouldn’t have, and Spotify told Android Authority they’re on it, trying to figure out what happened.

Spotify discovered someone gained unauthorized access to some of its audio files. They did this by collecting publicly available information and using illegal methods to bypass the platform’s security measures. Spotify is currently investigating the situation.

The website says it has archived almost all of Spotify’s listening history, but Spotify has only acknowledged that “some” audio files were accessed. It’s currently unclear how much content was affected or if Spotify will take any legal steps.

Anna’s Archive explains that their work is about saving music that might otherwise be lost. They point out that if streaming services like Spotify were to lose rights to songs or go out of business, a lot of lesser-known music could disappear. They acknowledge Spotify as a positive step towards preserving current music, but suggest there’s still more to be done.

Even though some people are trying to present it as simply saving music, downloading and sharing copyrighted songs in large numbers breaks Spotify’s rules and the law in many places. We don’t yet know exactly how widespread this problem is, as Spotify is still looking into it.

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2025-12-22 17:48