In what could be one of the biggest leaks in tech industry history, almost all of Spotify would have been copied by a group that promises to share it soon via P2P networks.
Anna’s Archive, a group of self-described “archivists”, has until now been famous for its work collecting and sharing scientific books and studies, in many cases becoming the only way to obtain certain publications.
Now the organization says got an almost perfect copy of Spotifythe streaming service, including music files, and promises to make them public in installments, starting with their metadata.
Concretely, the group claims to have archived the metadata of 256 million titles, in addition to audio files of 86 million songs; this represents 99.6% of Spotify.
This is a gigantic data leak, with the entire file occupying no less than 300 TB (terabytes) which will be shared via torrent with the files published on the official project page.
It’s such an absurd amount of data that the organization plans to share it little by little, starting first with the most popular songs on the platform and ending with the least played.
This is a fact they know thanks to analysis of already published metadata and which reveal curious details, such as that 70% of songs on Spotify have been listened to less than 1,000 times, while the most famous artists like Lady Gaga or Billie Eilish accumulate billions of views on their most popular songs.
However, what really caught the eye was the collection of tens of millions of songs the group claims to have obtained that could become one of the greatest “pirate treasures” in history.
Anna’s Archive claims to have made this Spotify copy for the sake of “preserving” the art hosted on the platformwhich is not available on any other service or in any other format.
Leakers say that while it’s easy to find the most popular songs, a large number of jobs can disappear overnight if one day Spotify is closed for any reason or if it loses the license due to disagreement with record companies and rights holders.
It’s not for nothing that some artists have already removed their songs from Spotify, most of them to protest what they see as the low economic benefits of offering their work for streaming. Spotify is also in a constant “struggle” with record companies, as evidenced by the huge delay in releasing music in high definition, which required new agreements.
However, it’s no secret that the main reason most people will be interested in this leak is to get free music and access the huge Spotify catalog without having to pay nor support advertisements.
For its part, Spotify did not specify whether the leak was real, although, in statements to Billboard, a representative confirmed that the company had opened an investigation into possible “illicit tactics” used to access files on its servers.
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