When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
(Image credit: Sipa USA via Heute ) Share Share by: Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Recent updates Update 12/22 at 4:31PM ET Spotify has shared the following statement: "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."
Spotify, the largest music streaming platform in the world with hundreds of millions of active users, and an extensive library of music has allegedly been hacked by Anna's Archive . The shadow library, who labels itself as archivists, has apparently scraped nearly the entirety of the platform, downloading roughly 300 TB of music that is now being distributed illegally via torrents.
Spotify has already acknowledged and responded to this attack, issuing the following statement to Android Authority :
"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. We are actively investigating the incident."
Gigantic VHS videotape hoard of thousands of videos stored in McDonald's boxes being given away for free
Discord data hacked in latest customer service breach to expose user information
Discord says only 70,000 government ID photos exposed in third-party service breach, denies 2.1 million figure — says it won't pay $3.5 million ransom
That "some" in the above comment is key because the leaked collection consists of around 86 million files in particular, representing ~37% of all music available on the platform (but 99.9% of listens). Most of them are preserved in Spotify's original OGG Vorbis 160 kbps format, but if any song has a popularity rating of exactly 0, then they've been re-encoded to 75kpbs to save space.
With that, there's 256 million rows of metadata that accounts for 99.6% of all listens on Spotify and it has been complied into query-able SQL databases. The group has done a near-lossless JSON reconstruction of Spotify's API, including 186 million unique ISRCs. — identifiers for individual recordings worldwide; think of them as ISBNs for music. All the album info, artist info, cover art etc., is included.
The blog post released by Anna's Archive going over this leak is surprisingly informative, including a bunch of charts that break down how Spotify treats music in general. For instance, around 70% of all songs on the platform barely get any attention, while 0.1% of the tracks are the most popular of all time. Most songs are also singles, rather than part of an album, and 120 BPM is the most common tempo.
Anyhow, the reason for this large-scale hack, as described by Anna's Archive itself, is preservation of music. Since the group is notorious for open-sourcing books without consent, it's applying much of the same logic here, arguing that Spotify's collection is too overtly focused on popular artists and sound quality. There needs to be an "authoritative list of torrents aiming to represent all music ever produced."
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/streaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/streaming/pirate-archivist-group-scrapes-spotifys-300tb-library-posts-free-torrents-for-downloading-investigation-underway-as-music-and-metadata-hit-torrent-sites#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- Moore Threads unveils next-gen gaming GPU with 15x performance and 50x ray tracing improvement — AI GPU with claimed performance between Hopper and Blackwell al
- Robots’ Holiday Wishes Come True: NVIDIA Jetson Platform Offers High-Performance Edge AI at Festive Prices
- AMD publishes first Zen 6 document detailing ground-up redesign on 2nm process node — brand-new 8-wide CPU core with strong vector capabilities
- NVIDIA Acquires Open-Source Workload Management Provider SchedMD
- Taiwan considers TSMC export ban that would prevent manufacturing its newest chip nodes in U.S. — limit exports to two generations behind leading-edge nodes, co
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.