Spotify is investigating a case of unauthorized access that has resulted in the extraction of public metadata and access to “some audio files”, attributed by the “archivist” group Anna’s Archive, which claims to have extracted approximately 99.6% of the songs from the platform.
Anna’s Archive is an organization that acts as an open-source and non-profit digital library, whose interventions are carried out as a way to centralize and offer free access to books, academic articles or other types of documents, some of which are subject to copyright.
In this regard, Anna’s Archive has claimed to have carried out a copy of practically all of Spotify’s content, specifically archiving metadata from 256 million tracks and audio files of 86 million songs, representing 99.6% of the content of the ‘streaming’ platform.
As shared by the organization in a statement on its blog, where it detailed that the complete file of the extracted content occupies less than 300 TB and that it is being distributed through “massive torrents”, which group the content according to its popularity, based on Spotify metrics.
In this sense, Anna’s Archive has defined it as the “first music preservation archive in the world that is completely open”, since anyone can download it on their devices, as part of its “mission” to preserve knowledge and culture.
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In addition, the organization has specified that, in this way, the preservation of all music is guaranteed, including that of lesser-known artists collected by the platform, and not just the songs or compositions of the most popular artists. Although Spotify “doesn’t have all the music in the world”, it has stated that “it’s a great start”. However, it has been detailed that any material published after July of this year may not be included.
To do this, Anna’s Archive identified a way to extract information from Spotify on a large scale through ‘scraping’. This is a technique that uses ‘software’ and bots to extract data from websites automatically, converting it into structured information.
However, it should be noted that songs published on Spotify are subject to strict copyright guidelines corresponding to record labels, the artists themselves, and the platform.
Therefore, this is an extraction of files and subsequent illegal distribution, which goes against Spotify’s terms of service and copyright law.
In this context, Spotify has shared in statements to Android Authority that they are conducting an investigation into unauthorized access, in which it has been identified that “a third party extracted public metadata using illicit tactics to evade Digital Rights Management (DRM) and access some audio files from the platform.”
So, although the company has not confirmed the magnitude of the data extraction, it confirms the leak and unauthorized access, so they will continue investigating what happened with a view to, predictably, taking possible legal action.
