An activist group has created a backup of the Spotify library. They want to offer millions of songs for free.
What kind of hackers are these? Unknown individuals claim in a blog post on “Anna’s Archive” that they have created a backup of Spotify.
Anna’s Archive is a so-called meta-search engine that specifically searches shadow libraries. Shadow libraries are online databases that provide copyrighted content such as movies, e-books, and music without the permission of copyright holders for free.
Anna’s Archive has set itself the special goal of collecting, cataloging, and making accessible the entire knowledge of humanity in one place for free.
Data theft on a large scale
What kind of hack is this? The blog post on Anna’s Archive states that they possess 300 terabytes of metadata and music files from Spotify. In total, there are 256 million songs, of which 86 million are distributed via bulk torrents. Now they want to use the data to build a preservation archive for music:
“Normally, Anna’s Archive focuses on text […]. But our mission (the preservation of the knowledge and culture of humanity) does not differentiate between media types. Sometimes, an opportunity arises outside the text domain. This is one such case. Some time ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify on a large scale. We saw a role for ourselves in building a music archive that is primarily focused on long-term preservation.”
The responsible individuals state that while Spotify does not have all the music in the world, it is a start and an attempt to initiate a preservation archive for music: “It is the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music that is completely open (which means it can be easily mirrored by anyone with sufficient storage). It comprises 86 million music files, covering about 99.6% of all streaming requests.”
Spotify confirmed the incident in a statement to billboard and stated that the company is investigating unauthorized access by third parties, where unauthorized individuals gained access to some music files on the platform.
What the hack tells us about Spotify: Anna’s Archive also presents some data from Spotify that was obtained from the hack in the blog post. They write, for example, that the sorting function of songs on Spotify is significantly influenced by a so-called popularity score calculated by an algorithm.
The popularity score, in turn, largely depends on the total number of plays and their recency. The popularity of artists and albums is mathematically derived from the popularity of individual tracks. Currently, popular songs include “Die With A Smile” by Lady Gaga, “DtMF” by Bad Bunny, and “Birds of a Feather” by Billie Eilish.
