Spotify Reportedly Removes ‘Nefarious’ Accounts Used to Scrape About 86 Million Music Files

Spotify has disabled various user accounts that were involved in scraping music files from its platform, the music streaming service reportedly said in a statement. This came shortly after an online open-source library, which usually archives text-based files, scraped millions of tracks and claimed that it had acquired nearly 99.6 percent of Spotify's streams. The group also said that the total size of the music files archived from Spotify's database was a little under 300TB. To prevent such scraping attempts in the future, the company has also put up new safeguards.

Spotify Scraping Attempt Termed an ‘Anti-Copyright Attack'

In a statement to Android Authority, Spotify said that it has “identified and disabled” user accounts that were used for unlawfully scraping music files from its platform. The company added that it has implemented new safeguards to protect itself against such “anti-copyright attacks”. It will also continue to monitor “suspicious behaviour”.

Spotify previously said that a third party had managed to scrap the public metadata and employed “illicit tactics” to bypass Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to access “some” of its audio files.

The streaming platform's actions came soon after Anna's Archive claimed in a blog post that it had "archived” around 86 million music files of the streaming service, which accounted for about 99.6 percent of its streams. The total size of the data that was backed up was nearly 300TB.

It stated that “a while ago”, the group discovered a method to scrape audio files from Spotify at scale. They claim that the move was made to create a music archive “primarily aimed at preservation.”

The group further said that the current ways of sharing music online have “major issues”. The blog post mentioned that there is an “over-focus” on the music of popular artists and providing the highest streaming quality, which inflates the file size, making it hard for people to maintain an offline archive of the music. Moreover, the group pointed out that there is an absence of “authoritative lists” of torrents or platforms, which indulge in piracy. Hence, Anna's Archive scraped Spotify to build a “preservation archive for music”.

To get their hands on around 86 million Spotify music files, which represent about 99.6 percent of its streams, Anna's Archive prioritised scraping the popular tracks first. The group claims that it got close to scraping “all (popular) tracks” on the music streaming platform in their original OGG Vorbis quality at 160kb/s.

Additionally, the blog stated that Anna's Archive downloaded songs released between 2007 and 2025. Hence, songs released after that may not be present in its archive. It also claimed that it has managed to create the “largest music metadata database”, which is publicly available.