Pirate activist group scrapes Spotify library of 86 million audio files

MANILA, Philippines – A pirate activist group claims to have scraped and released the metadata from Spotify, according to a blog post on open-source search engine Anna’s Archive.

The Anna’s Archive blogpost by “ez” said the scrape has 256 million rows of music track metadata, alongside 86 million audio files. These will reportedly be distributed on peer-to-peer sharing networks in bulk torrents, at a total of roughly 300 terabytes.

As of Monday, December 22 (Philippine time), only the metadata has been released.

The post added, “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.” Specifically, the attempt to scrape Spotify aimed to address an over-focus on maintaining the archives of popular artists and at having the highest possible file quality of recordings.

It is also an attempt to create an authoritative list of torrents meant to represent “all music ever produced,” though doing so circumvented Spotify’s digital rights management (DRM) systems.

A Spotify representative, in a statement obtained by Billboard, said, “An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.”

“We are actively investigating the incident,” Spotify added. – Rappler.com