According to reports, a pirate activist group has gained access to Spotify’s vast music library, collecting over 256 million rows of music metadata and over 86 million audio files. These will be distributed in bulk torrents via P2P file-sharing networks under the pretext of “preservation.”
Pirates Scrape 86 Million Audio Files from Spotify
This report comes from a blog post shared on the open-source search engine, Anna’s Archive. The post mentioned, “A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.” This archive is estimated to be around 300 terabytes in size and contains a major chunk of songs and albums from popular artists in the highest possible audio quality.
The group intends to utilize it to serve an authoritative list of torrents and represent “every music ever made.” If someone has the capacity to store and host a lot of songs and files, they could create their own version of Spotify. Naturally, Spotify’s digital rights management systems (DRM) are not followed by the archive.
A Spotify representative shared a statement with Billboard, saying, “An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.” Spotify later added, “We are actively investigating the incident.”
This can pose a very serious problem for the music streaming giant. People can come up with their self-hosted alternatives to Spotify now. But how this situation unfolds and whether there is any long-term impact is yet to be seen.