Anna’s Archive publishes millions of Spotify tracks

The shadow library Anna's Archive has begun publishing a portion of the Spotify database secured last year as a torrent. The website TorrentFreak reports this. A total of 2.8 million files were published, including 6 terabytes of music. Anna's Archive has also published additional metadata.

On January 20, Spotify, along with several music labels, obtained a temporary injunction from a US court against Anna's Archive, prohibiting the publication of the files. Nevertheless, Anna's Archive has now apparently decided to proceed with the publication. The currently available files represent only a portion of the dataset downloaded by Anna's Archive. The rest is to follow gradually, as was indicated in an earlier announcement.

47 Torrents

According to TorrentFreak, the music files are not provided with clear names but as IDs. To decrypt which tracks are behind the IDs, the names must be matched using a 29 GB metadata file. The files can be downloaded in a total of 47 torrents, which users have found in the file torrents.json, hosted on Anna's Archive, according to TorrentFreak. New links were already entered there on February 8.

Anna's Archive is typically used as a meta-search engine primarily for documents and books. In December, the archive project announced that it had downloaded a total of 86 million music tracks from Spotify. This represented 37 percent of the hosted recordings but accounted for 99.6 percent of all actual streams. Thus, popular tracks were copied above all. Additionally, according to Anna's Archive's own statements, metadata from 256 million recordings has been secured.

“Brazen theft”

At the end of January, Spotify, along with music labels Universal, Sony, and Warner, filed a lawsuit against Anna's Archive. In it, the plaintiffs speak of “brazen theft of millions of files” and demand damages of up to US$150,000 per copied work – the maximum statutory amount for copyright infringement in the USA. With a total of 86 million music tracks, this could theoretically amount to a sum in the trillions. Anna's Archive has not responded to the lawsuit.

On January 20, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District Court in New York issued a temporary injunction (PDF provided by Music Business Worldwide), according to which Anna's Archive is not allowed to publish the secured files. Furthermore, providers must block access to the website, which, however, remains accessible via various domains.

Neither Spotify nor those responsible for Anna's Archive have commented on the publication of the data so far.

(dahe)