A collective of pirate activists seeking to preserve music history has announced that it has backed up a gigantic portion of Spotify’s music catalog. They did this as part of a broader effort to preserve humanity’s culture and art as humanly possible. You know, just in case the large platforms hosting it all disappear, taking all that evidence of human endeavor along with them.
Anna’s Archive is a non-profit best known for hoarding books and academic papers. It announced it has scraped Spotify on an industrial scale. The group claims to have archived metadata for roughly 256 million tracks and audio files. About 86 million have audio files, totaling just under 300 terabytes.
Most of the material predates July 2025, meaning recent releases may be missing, but the archive still reportedly covers 99.6 percent of the music people listen to on Spotify.
Pirates Say They’ve Copied Almost Spotify’s Entire Music Catalog
That number sounds impossible until you remember how streaming works. A tiny sliver of blockbuster songs accounts for the overwhelming majority of plays, while tens of millions of tracks sit untouched, collecting digital dust.
According to Anna’s Archive, Spotify’s top few songs alone dwarf the combined streams of the platform’s least-played tens of millions. From a preservation standpoint, the archive argues, grabbing what people actually hear matters more than chasing perfect completeness.
The group frames the project as cultural insurance. Music, they argue, is already being “preserved,” but mostly in ways that favor superstar artists, ultra-high audio quality, or private collections scattered around the world and squirreled away in private vaults.
What’s missing is a comprehensive, practical archive meant to survive wars, natural disasters, budget cuts, or corporate collapses. They plan to release the data in phases, starting with metadata, then audio files ranked by popularity, and eventually album art.
Spotify is not happy about this, as you could imagine. The company says it has shut down accounts involved in what it calls unlawful scraping and added new safeguards against copyright abuse, reiterating its stance against piracy and in defense of artists.
Platforms present themselves as the stewards of culture, while outsiders argue that anything locked behind subscriptions and DRM isn’t really preserved at all. Whether Anna’s Archive is seen as a digital library or a piracy operation may ultimately depend less on intent than on which version of the future people trust more: one run by corporations, or one run by archivists with a lot of hard drives.
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