Activist group claims it scraped Spotify’s 86 million song library

An activist group has claimed it has scraped millions of tracks from Spotify, and will soon release them online.

As The Guardian reports, the organisation, called Anna’s Archive, said it had scraped 86 million music files from the streaming platform, as well as 256 million rows of metadata such as artist names and album titles. Spotify, which has a music library of more than 100 million, said that the leak did not represent its entire inventory of music.

The streaming company added that it had “identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping”. Commentators have said that the scraping and any associated leak could help AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.

In a statement about the leak said, representatives for Spotify said: “An investigation into unauthorised access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management] to access some of the platform’s audio files.” The company added at the time of writing last week that it believed that the scraped data had not yet been leaked publicly.

Anna’s Archive said in a blog that it wanted to create a “‘preservation archive’ for music”, and claimed that the scraped audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify’s 700 million global users. The group added that the illegally obtained media would be shared via torrenting.

Spotify added that it had introduced new protection methods “for these types of anti-copyright attacks” following the announcement by Anna’s Archive announcement. The streaming company was “actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour,” it said.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Spotify was expected to increase its US subscription prices in early 2026.

The price increase will follow Spotify’s recent addition of lossless audio to its service in some territories, as well as its acquisition of the sample-aggregating music database WhoSampled.

Meanwhile, Spotify continues to court controversy, with a number of artists and labels removing their work from the streaming platform. Xiu Xiu, Kalahari Oyster Cult and Deerhoof are amongst those to have exited the platform in response to CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek’s connections to AI military defence company Helsing, including June’s  €600 million investment in the firm, and a previous €100 million stake acquired in 2021.