Anna’s Archive recently said in a social media post that it does not believe that the domain suspension was related to its mass Spotify scraping.
Spotify started monitoring its platform for suspicious activity after Anna's Archive scraped music files.
Photo Credit: Pexels/ John Tekeridis
Spotify, along with Warner and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the online open-source library, Anna's Archive, in December 2025 after it scraped hundreds of terabytes from the music streaming platform, according to the recently unsealed court documents. To provide temporary relief to the plaintiffs, the US District Court awarded a Temporary Restraining Order to Spotify and the music labels, which resulted in the suspension of Anna's Archive domains. The shadow library earlier believed that the ban was unrelated to its unauthorised scraping of nearly 86 million Spotify audio files.
On January 16, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed the documents containing details regarding Spotify and multiple music labels' lawsuit against Anna's Archive. According to the unsealed documents, the companies requested the US District Court for a temporary restraining order against the online open-source library, which the court awarded the same day, suspending Anna's Archive's domains (including the .org), mandating the Public Interest Registry (PIR) and Cloudflare to block the same.
In a thread on Reddit, Anna's Archive claimed that the recent .org domain suspension was unrelated to its scraping of Spotify's music files. It further said that this “unfortunately happens to shadow libraries” regularly. However, the court documents confirm that the domain was suspended due to the ongoing lawsuit.
This comes weeks after Spotify disabled various user accounts that were involved in scraping audio files from its platform, terming them “nefarious”. Detailing its attempt to download audio from Spotify, Anna's Archive said in a blog post that “a while ago” the group discovered a way to scrape audio files from the music streaming platform at scale.
Anna's Archive said that it managed to create a backup of about 86 million Spotify music files, creating an archive totalling about 300TB. The open-source library claimed that this was “primarily aimed at preservation” of music, as the current ways of sharing music online have “major issues”. It prioritised backing up songs based on popularity, allowing people to download them for offline listening.
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