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Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents
December 22, 2025
- Anna’s Archive has scraped metadata for 256 million Spotify tracks and audio for 86 million songs.
- The archive represents approximately 99.6% of all listens on the platform.
- Nearly 300TB of data is being distributed via torrents, organized by popularity.
- Spotify confirms unauthorized access and is investigating the incident.
Anna’s Archive, an organization known for backing up books and research papers, claims to have scraped nearly the entire Spotify catalog in what it calls a “preservation archive” for music.
According to the group’s blog post, the archive includes metadata for an estimated 99.9% of Spotify’s approximately 256 million tracks, plus audio files for 86 million songs. While that represents only 37% of total tracks, Anna’s Archive says it covers around 99.6% of actual listening activity on the platform.
The full collection weighs in at just under 300TB and is being distributed via bulk torrents sorted by Spotify’s internal popularity metric. According to Anna’s Archive, this makes it “the largest publicly available music metadata database” and “the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music which is fully open.”
Spotify responds
Spotify has shared the following statement addressing the archive:
“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.”
Spotify’s statement stops short of confirming the scale described by Anna’s Archive. While the platform says only “some” of its audio files were accessed, Anna’s Archive claims it archived music representing 99.6% of all listens on Spotify.
Audio quality and encoding
For tracks with Spotify popularity scores above zero, the archive contains files in their original Ogg Vorbis format at 160kbps. For less popular tracks (popularity = 0), the audio has been re-encoded to Ogg Opus at 75kbps to save storage space—a quality Anna’s Archive claims “sounds the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.”
The archive includes tracks released through July 2025, with anything after that date potentially missing. Original files from Spotify contained no embedded metadata, so Anna’s Archive added track titles, ISRCs, UPCs, album art, and ReplayGain information to the archived files.
Currently, only metadata is fully available to the public. The music files themselves are being released gradually, starting with the most popular tracks.
Do you still download music files in 2025?
Preservation or piracy?
Anna’s Archive frames the project as addressing gaps in existing music preservation efforts, which the group says focus too heavily on popular artists and lossless audio formats. The organization argues that lesser-known music could disappear if streaming platforms lose licenses or shut down.
However, this almost certainly violates Spotify’s terms of service and copyright law in most jurisdictions. Spotify licenses music from record labels and rights holders under strict legal agreements, and mass scraping and redistribution via torrents falls outside those terms.
Despite Anna’s Archive positioning this as preservation rather than piracy, copyright law typically doesn’t include exceptions for archival intent. Legal action from Spotify and major record labels seems likely, though whether they can effectively contain an archive already distributed across torrents remains unclear.
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