- Pirates have scraped over 300 terabytes worth of music files and metadata from Spotify.
- The data was scraped in the name of "preservation" and the group is planning to share it via P2P systems in bulk torrents.
- This can pose a serious threat to Spotify, as anyone with enough storage can use these music files to host their own version of Spotify.
A pirate activist group has reportedly breached Spotify’s large music library, scraping over 256 million rows of music metadata and over 86 million audio files, and in the name of “preservation,” it will be distributed via P2P file-sharing networks in bulk torrents.
Pirates Scrape 86 Million Audio Files from Spotify
This report comes from a blog post shared on the open-source search engine, Anna’s Archive. The post mentioned, “A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.” This archive is estimated to be around 300 terabytes in size and contains a major chunk of songs and albums from popular artists in the highest possible audio quality.
The group plans to use it to represent “all music ever produced” and serve an authoritative list of torrents. This would allow anyone to make their own version of Spotify if they have the resources to store and host a large number of tracks and files. Of course, the archive doesn’t adhere to Spotify’s digital rights management systems (DRM).
A Spotify representative shared a statement with Billboard, saying, “An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files.” Spotify later added, “We are actively investigating the incident.”
This can pose a very serious problem for the music streaming giant. People can come up with their self-hosted alternatives to Spotify now. But how this situation unfolds and whether there is any long-term impact is yet to be seen.
