(Image source from: Spotify.com)

Spotify has shut down several user accounts that participated in extracting music files from its service, as the music streaming company reportedly mentioned in a statement. This action followed an announcement by an online open-source library, typically used for preserving text files, which claimed to have collected millions of tracks and stated it had obtained around 99.6 percent of Spotify's streams. The organization also noted that the total volume of the music files gathered from Spotify's database was just under 300TB. In order to deter similar scraping efforts in the future, the company has introduced new protective measures. In a statement to Android Authority, Spotify confirmed that it has “identified and shut down” user accounts that engaged in illegally scraping music files from the platform. The company added that it has established new protections to safeguard against these “anti-copyright attacks.” Furthermore, it will keep an eye on any “suspicious activity.”

Spotify had previously noted that a third party had successfully extracted public metadata and used “illicit methods” to circumvent the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to gain access to “some” of its audio files. The actions taken by the streaming service occurred shortly after Anna's Archive stated in a blog post that it had “archived” about 86 million music files from the streaming platform, representing around 99.6 percent of its streams. The overall data size that was saved was nearly 300TB. According to the group, they discovered a way to scrape audio files from Spotify on a large scale “a while back.” They argue that this effort was aimed at creating a music archive focused on preservation. The group further explained that current methods of sharing music online face “serious problems.” The blog post pointed out that there is an “over-emphasis” on popular artists’ music and maximizing streaming quality, which increases file size and complicates maintaining an offline music archive. Additionally, the group highlighted the lack of “authoritative lists” of torrents or platforms involved in piracy. Therefore, Anna's Archive scraped Spotify to establish a “preservation archive for music.”

To acquire around 86 million music files from Spotify, representing about 99.6 percent of its streams, Anna's Archive focused on scraping the most popular tracks first. The group asserts that it came close to scraping “all (popular) tracks” from the music streaming service in their original OGG Vorbis quality at 160kb/s. Moreover, the blog mentioned that Anna's Archive downloaded songs released from 2007 to 2025. Thus, songs released after that period may not be included in its archive. It also claimed to have created the “largest publicly available music metadata database.”