A large chunk of Spotify could soon be available to download online for free, if you’ve got enough disk space to spare.
Anna’s Archive, a controversial non-profit project that aims to preserve all of humanity’s culture and knowledge, announced over the weekend that it has managed to back up Spotify in a massive archive.
Typically, the open-source site focuses on books, magazines, and academic papers, pulling them from shadow libraries, official collections, and other sources and making them available via torrents. But now, Anna’s Archive is turning its attention to music, starting with Spotify.
“This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a ‘preservation archive’ for music,” the people behind Anna’s Archive wrote in a blog post. “Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.”
According to the post, the group discovered some time ago how to scrape Spotify at scale and decided it was in a position to build a music archive focused on preservation.
Anna’s Archive claims it has backed up metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files for about 86 million of them. The total size of the collection comes in just under 300 terabytes. Most of the files were scraped before July 2025, meaning newer releases may be missing.
While the project only scraped a fraction of Spotify’s total music files, it says the collection still represents roughly 99.6% of music actually listened to on the platform.
For instance, it estimates that Spotify’s top three songs have more combined streams than the bottom 20 to 100 million tracks put together. Those songs are Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’s “Die With a Smile” (3 billion streams), Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” (3.1 billion streams), and Bad Bunny’s “DtMF” (1 billion streams).
The non-profit acknowledged that music is already being preserved in various ways, but said many existing efforts have major shortcomings. Among the issues is an overemphasis on the most popular artists, a fixation on the highest possible audio quality (which makes comprehensive archiving impractical due to file size), and the lack of an authoritative torrent index meant to represent all recorded music.
Anna’s Archive said the files will be released in phases, starting with metadata, followed by audio files (shared in order of popularity) and then album art.
“With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes,” the project’s blog read.
The streaming giant, unsurprisingly, is not thrilled.
“Spotify 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,” a Spotify spokesperson told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “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.”
Source: Gizmodo