Someone just archived all of Spotify, and it’s already on torrents

Anna’s Archive, best known for backing up books and research papers, just pulled off something absolutely wild. It claims to have scraped almost the entirety of Spotify.

According to a new blog post, the group has archived metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files for 86 million songs, covering around 99.6% of all listens on Spotify. The full archive weighs in at just under 300TB and is being distributed via bulk torrents, sorted by popularity.

If that sounds enormous, it is. Anna’s Archive says this is now the largest publicly available music metadata database in the world.

The group frames the project as a “preservation archive” for music. They argue that while popular songs are backed up well, huge chunks of lesser-known music could disappear if music streaming platforms pull the plug or lose licenses. They said Spotify is “a great start” for preserving modern music history.

The audio itself mostly comes straight from Spotify. Popular tracks are stored in their original 160kbps format, while less-played songs have been re-encoded into smaller files to save space. Anything released after July 2025 may be missing from the archive.

Right now, only metadata is fully available. The music files are being released gradually, starting with the most popular tracks.

No, this isn’t legal

Spotify licenses most of the music on its platform from record labels and rights holders under very strict legal terms. Mass-scraping audio files and redistributing them via torrents violates Spotify’s terms of service and copyright law in many countries.

Even if Anna’s Archive insists this is about preservation rather than piracy, copyright law generally doesn’t make exceptions for such “good intentions.”

It wouldn’t be surprising if Spotify and major record companies respond with takedown requests, legal threats, or worse. Whether they can actually put this archive back in the bottle is something we’ll have to wait and watch.