Spotify is investigating a case of unauthorized access that has resulted in the extraction of public metadata and access to “some audio files”, attributed to the group of “archivists” Anna’s Archive, which claims to have extracted approximately 99.6% of the songs on the platform.
Anna’s Archive is an organization that acts as an open source, non-profit digital library, whose interventions are carried out as a way to centralize and offer free access to books, academic articles or other types of documents, some of them subject to copyright.
In this sense, Anna’s Archive has claimed to have made a copy of practically all Spotify content, specifically archiving metadata of 256 million tracks and audio files of 86 million songs, which represents 99.6% of the content on the platform. streaming.
This was shared by the organization in a statement on its blog, where it detailed that the complete archive of extracted content occupies less than 300 TB and that it is being distributed through “massive torrents”, which group the content according to its popularity, based on Spotify metrics.
Anna’s Archive has defined it as the “first music preservation archive in the world that is completely open”, since anyone will be able to download it to their devices, as part of its “mission” to preserve knowledge and culture.
In addition, the organization has specified that, in this way, the preservation of all music is guaranteed, including that of lesser-known artists collected by the platform, and not only the songs or compositions of the most popular artists. Although Spotify “does not have all the music in the world,” he stated that “it is a great start.” However, it has been detailed that any material published after July of this year may not be included.
To do this, Anna’s Archive identified a way to extract information from Spotify on a large scale using scraping. That is, a technique that uses software y bots to extract data from websites in an automated way, converting it into structured information.
However, it should be noted that songs published on Spotify are subject to strict copyright guidelines applicable to record labels, the artists themselves, and the platform. Therefore, this is illegal file extraction and subsequent distribution, which goes against Spotify’s terms of service and copyright legislation.
In this framework, Spotify has shared in statements to Android Authority that they are carrying out an investigation into unauthorized access, in which it has been identified that “a third party extracted public metadata used illicit tactics to evade Digital Rights Management (DRM) and access some audio files on the platform.”
Thus, although the company has not confirmed the magnitude of the data extraction, it confirms the leak and unauthorized access, so they will continue to investigate what happened with a view to, foreseeably, taking possible legal action.