Spotify Says It’s Shutting Down Access to Site That Scraped Its Music Library

Spotify says it’s cutting off access to some user accounts and adding safeguards after a shadow library website claimed to have scraped 99.6% of Spotify’s metadata and audio files from the streaming service’s music library.

On Dec. 20, the website Anna’s Archive said in a blog post that it was distributing 300 terabytes worth of data for 256 million music tracks it scraped from Spotify. It has released 99.6 of the service’s music library, or 86 million music files of the most popular tracks. The blog post called it a preservation effort and said it was considering allowing the downloading of individual files in the future. The post also called for donations to Anna’s Archive.

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Spotify responded, saying it’s been investigating the scraping and is taking action against Anna’s Archive. “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” a spokesperson told CNET in an email.

“We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior. 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,” the spokesperson said.

In its blog post, Anna’s Archive said the torrent release of metadata was just the first step of its plans for the Spotify data it collected. It said the release of music files, in order of popularity on Spotify, was next, to be followed by additional file metadata, album art and patching files to reconstruct Spotify’s original files. “This is by far the largest music metadata database that is publicly available,” the blog post said.