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Spotify Lawsuit Led to Court Order That Cut Off Anna’s Archive Domains, Court Documents Show

Spotify Lawsuit Led to Court Order That Cut Off Anna’s Archive Domains, Court Documents Show

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.

Written by Dhruv Raghav, Edited by David Delima | Updated: 22 January 2026 13:40 IST

Spotify Lawsuit Led to Court Order That Cut Off Anna’s Archive Domains, Court Documents Show

Photo Credit: Pexels/ John Tekeridis

Spotify started monitoring its platform for suspicious activity after Anna's Archive scraped music files.

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Highlights

Spotify had disabled various “nefarious” accounts in December 2025
The US District Court ordered documents to be unsealed on January 16
Anna’s Archive had backed up 300TB of Spotify music files

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.

US District Court's Temporary Restraining Order Suspended Anna's Archive Domain

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.

Spotify Adds Real-Time Listening Activity, Request to Jam Features

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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Further reading: Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner, Anna Archive

Dhruv Raghav

Email Dhruv Raghav

Dhruv Raghav is currently working as a Senior Sub Editor at Gadgets360. He has previously covered the North American financial markets as a Headline News Correspondent for a major news agency. After taking a sabbatical to prepare for the Civil Services examination, he returned to journalism to cover tech policy, with a special focus on AI laws and online gaming regulation. Now, he is back in Gadgets360 to write features and edit stories. To unwind, he likes to spend time with his PS5, listening ...More