Spotify Data Leak: 86 Million Songs to be Released Online | 4Gamers

An open-source collective known as Anna’s Archive has reportedly extracted a massive dataset of music information from Spotify, encompassing metadata for 256 million songs and approximately 86 million audio files. The group plans to release the nearly 300TB archive via a peer-to-peer network, sparking significant concern within the music industry and cybersecurity communities.

According to a post on the organization’s official blog, Anna’s Archive discovered a method for “scaling data extraction from Spotify,” viewing it as a unique opportunity to establish a comprehensive archive dedicated to “preserving human musical culture.”

While previously focused on books and academic papers, the organization emphasizes that its preservation mission extends to all media formats, recognizing music as an integral part of human cultural heritage. This move underscores a growing trend of data preservation efforts outside of traditional institutional control.

Anna’s Archive states that the publicly available database covers music uploaded to Spotify between 2007 and July 2025, containing roughly 86 million songs – representing approximately 99.6% of total streams on the platform. A smaller file, featuring the 10,000 most popular songs on Spotify, is also being released, which the group claims is the largest publicly available music metadata database globally.

Spotify responded to the incident, clarifying to Billboard that the platform was not “hacked.” Instead, the company alleges that a third party engaged in “stream-ripping” – violating the platform’s terms of service by establishing user accounts to systematically extract data – and circumvented Digital Rights Management (DRM) protections to access audio files and public metadata.

A Spotify spokesperson stated that the company has identified and deactivated suspicious accounts involved in the unauthorized data extraction and has implemented new safeguards to address similar copyright infringement attempts. The platform continues to monitor for anomalous activity.

Spotify reaffirmed its commitment to supporting artists and collaborating with industry partners to protect creator rights and combat piracy. The company also noted that Anna’s Archive did not seek contact prior to releasing the files and that the incident did not impact Spotify’s internal business systems.

It is worth noting that Anna’s Archive has faced blocking in several countries due to ongoing copyright concerns. The organization was founded in 2022 following a U.S. Department of Justice crackdown on Z-Library, and has since consolidated multiple free online databases, including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and the Internet Archive.

According to publicly available data, as of December of this year, Anna’s Archive has cataloged over 61 million books and 95 million academic papers. The organization has also faced significant removal requests from publishers, resulting in Google removing nearly 800 million search links.

An analysis of the Spotify data released by Anna’s Archive reveals that the platform’s three most streamed songs are Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” Lady Gaga’s “Die with a Smile,” and Bad Bunny’s “DtMF.” These three tracks collectively account for more streams than the combined total of the bottom tens of millions of songs on the platform, highlighting the extreme concentration of popularity within the streaming music ecosystem.