This website has made a “backup” of Spotify: it has downloaded 300 TB of music and is distributing it via torrents.
For the average listener, the file lacks practical use compared to the convenience of streaming… but then again, its goal isn’t to compete with Spotify itself.
cc2 Marcos Merino
Anna’s Archive is an online project for distributing copyrighted books and scientific articles, famous for having positioned itself as the successor to the persecuted Z-Library . Now, however, they have made an unexpected and controversial leap into the realm of music, creating a massive “backup” of Spotify, the world’s largest music platform, by downloading some 300 terabytes of music .
An unprecedented archive: overwhelming figures
According to documentation published by Anna’s Archive’s own team, the project consists of two main parts: metadata and audio files .
27 SPOTIFY TRICKS – Control all your MUSIC like no one else!
- 256 million tracks properly cataloged using metadata.
- 186 million unique ISRC codes , the standard identifier for music recordings.
- 86 million audio files already archived.
- Approximately 300 TB of data , distributed in torrents (free download) grouped by popularity level.
- Estimated coverage of 99.6% of all listens made on Spotify.
In the words of the project’s own volunteers, it is the largest open music archive ever created , and the first explicitly conceived as a comprehensive preservation archive, easily replicable by anyone with sufficient disk space and bandwidth.
Why back up your Spotify data?
Anna’s Archive justifies the initiative as a natural extension of its mission: to preserve the knowledge and culture of humanity, without discriminating by format : until now, its focus had been on texts —books, academic articles, historical documents— because of their high information density, but, as they themselves recall, music is also culture , and the almost hegemonic dominance of private platforms poses long-term risks.
The central argument is simple: if a substantial part of the world’s musical heritage is only accessible within closed platforms , its preservation depends on business decisions, licensing, mergers, bankruptcies, or changes in business model. The archive is thus presented as insurance against digital disappearance .
Furthermore, an archive of this size is a treasure trove for studies in computational musicology, music classification, and the training of artificial intelligence models. However, as some critics point out, publicly using this type of data raises serious legal issues .
How the copy was built: ‘scraping’ on an industrial scale
The developers explain that they discovered a method to extract data and files from Spotify on a large scale . From there, they prioritized tracks according to the platform’s own popularity indicator.
- For songs with popularity greater than zero , the original files were preserved in OGG Vorbis at 160 kbps , without re-encoding the audio.
- For tracks with zero popularity was used , a recompression in OGG Opus at 75 kbps , a compromise to reduce file size in the face of the vastness of the musical ‘long tail’.
- Complete metadata was added: title, artist, album, ISRC, cover art, and technical data.
The result is a structure designed not for casual consumption, but for systematic preservation and massive analysis. In fact, unlike Spotify, this archive doesn’t offer a user-friendly interface for instantly searching and playing songs. Everything is distributed via torrents , in large blocks organized by popularity.
This is no coincidence. According to Anna’s Archive, the goal is not to compete with commercial streaming, but to ensure that data can survive, replicate, and redistribute itself without relying on a single server or entity. The use of BitTorrent makes the archive difficult to censor and costly to remove .
Cultural preservation? Or an attack on the music industry?
Some users have pointed out an ironic detail: Spotify was born in a context where much of the music circulated without the permission of copyright holders , and its success was partly due to offering a more convenient alternative to P2P programs. Now, two decades later, a ‘backup’ of the platform itself is reopening old wounds in the digital music ecosystem.
For the music industry, downloading and redistributing millions of copyrighted songs clearly fits its definition of large-scale “piracy,” potentially larger than Napster’s in its day .
For the proponents of this initiative, however, it is a form of cultural resistance against a model in which access to music depends on subscriptions, territorial licenses and corporate decisions: they argue that history shows that music tends to be better preserved when it circulates freely .
For now, Anna’s Archive continues to ask for donations and seeders , convinced that her project is a necessary step to ensure that, whatever happens to commercial platforms, the world’s music does not disappear .
Via | Anna’s Archive
