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Spotify music data has been scraped by a group and over 200 million songs are freely available to the public.
Spotify songs have been scraped and made available via torrents
Spotify has confirmed that most of its music catalogue was scraped by a group and hosted on the internet for millions to freely download. The group behind the data scrape claims it was able to access metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files of over 85 million songs which is the bulk of the content hosted by the streaming platform.
All the tracks have been spread across via torrents making it easy for people to download based on the seeds offered to the music files. The group called Anna’s Archive even claims this is the largest music catalogue that is freely available to the public with songs downloaded all the way from 2007 to 2025 during the massive data scraping which has file size of around 300TB available to everyone.
Spotify Music Freely Available: Why Was The Data Was Scraped?
The group claims its act of scraping Spotify’s music metadata was a project to preserve archives for music. It also pointed out that lesser known artists get lost in the clutter of Spotify and eventually lose their place and value on the platform. They feel Spotify is only good to preserve the modern music lineup, which in some ways could be true.
What Is Spotify Doing?
Spotify has kept the details to a minimum and has refused to confirm the impact of the data scraping by the group. However, the platform has reportedly been quoted by Android Authority talking about its attempt to penalise the user accounts that seem to have been involved in the data scraping.
“Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. 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.”
Streaming platforms are facing questions about their business models. People did move away from torrents because of piracy concerns but the recent pivot to more ads and other less user-friendly moves have prompted people to revert to the old form. This data scraping seems to be a part of that approach but not the right way to tackle the issues faced by millions.
Delhi, India, India
December 23, 2025, 13:05 IST
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