Spotify Crisis: A Massive 300 TB Music Archive Leaked Online

Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streaming platforms, has become the center of attention following an unprecedented data breach. According to claims, a group known as Anna’s Archive systematically scraped a vast portion of Spotify’s music catalog, amassing nearly 300 terabytes of data and distributing it illegally via torrent networks. The incident has sparked major debates around copyright protection and digital content security.

In a statement to Android Authority, Spotify confirmed that it had detected unauthorized access. The company explained that a third party harvested publicly available metadata and then used illegal methods to bypass DRM protections. Spotify emphasized that a comprehensive investigation is ongoing to determine the full scope of the breach and to address any potential vulnerabilities.

The scale of the leak is striking. An estimated 86 million tracks are said to have been exposed. While this represents roughly 37 percent of Spotify’s total catalog, it astonishingly accounts for nearly 99.9 percent of all listens on the platform. Most of the files remain in Spotify’s standard OGG Vorbis 160 kbps format, while tracks with virtually zero popularity were reportedly re-encoded at 75 kbps to save storage space.

Beyond audio files, an enormous pool of data was also compromised. Around 256 million rows of metadata—covering 99.6 percent of all listens—have been compiled into searchable SQL databases. In addition, Spotify’s API has been almost entirely reconstructed in JSON format, incorporating 186 million unique ISRC codes, along with album details, artist information, and cover artwork.

In a blog post, Anna’s Archive went beyond technical explanations and shared revealing statistics about Spotify’s music ecosystem. According to the group, nearly 70 percent of songs on the platform are barely listened to, while just 0.1 percent achieve extreme popularity. These findings have reignited discussions about algorithmic visibility and inequality within digital music platforms.

Anna’s Archive claims that the motivation behind the breach is the preservation of music. Known for previously releasing unauthorized open-access book archives, the group argues that Spotify prioritizes mainstream artists and commercial success over comprehensive cultural preservation. They advocate for a permanent, decentralized torrent-based archive that aims to represent all music ever produced.

The shared torrents are hosted on the group’s own servers and packaged using a custom format called Anna’s Archive Containers (AAC). While metadata has already been released, the remaining audio files are expected to be distributed gradually in large batches, ordered by popularity. As a result, the true impact of this massive leak on Spotify and the global music industry will only become clear over time.