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Broadly, yes—but not in the sense that every Spotify song was copied. On December 20, 2025, the shadow-library project Anna’s Archive said it had assembled about 300 TB of Spotify-related data: metadata for an estimated 99.9% of roughly 256 million tracks, plus audio files for about 86 million songs. The group estimated those audio files represented 99.6% of Spotify listens. That is near-total coverage by listening activity, not by song count—and the figures come from the group, not an independent audit.
What happened
Anna’s Archive, known for indexing books and academic papers, announced that it had scraped Spotify at scale and was building a large music archive. It described the project as an effort to preserve culture beyond text. Its announcement said the collection included catalog metadata and audio, with files distributed in large torrent bundles grouped by popularity. The project also described additional release stages involving file metadata, album art and patch files; the existence of a planned stage does not mean every component was complete or equally available.
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The headline’s “pretty much all” needs a careful definition. Anna’s Archive estimated that its metadata covered about 99.9% of Spotify’s catalog, or approximately 256 million tracks. It reported audio files for around 86 million songs. The group’s 99.6% figure refers to estimated listening activity, not 99.6% of songs. Its announcement is the source for these totals and its methods; they have not been independently audited. Anna’s Archive’s announcement sets out its claims.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors| Claim | What it means |
|---|---|
| Metadata for nearly all tracks | The group estimated metadata for roughly 256 million catalog entries, or 99.9% of tracks. |
| Audio for 86 million songs | Audio was reported for a large subset—not the whole catalog. |
| 99.6% coverage | The group estimated the files accounted for 99.6% of listens. A concentrated set of popular recordings can generate most plays while millions of less-played tracks account for very few. |
Tracks, recordings and musical works are not interchangeable counts. Spotify entries can include alternate versions, remasters, duplicate uploads or other distinct catalog items; Anna’s Archive also reported roughly 186 million unique ISRCs. An ISRC is an identifier for a sound recording or music video. Neither the track total nor the ISRC total should be read as a count of entirely distinct compositions.
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Was Spotify hacked?
“Scraped” is the more precise description supported by the available reporting. Anna’s Archive said it found a way to collect Spotify material at scale. Spotify characterized the activity as unlawful scraping, said it identified and disabled the accounts involved, and said it added safeguards. Reporting described the operation as using accounts rather than breaking into Spotify’s internal business systems. That does not establish a conventional corporate-system breach. See The Record’s account of Spotify’s response and Futurism’s reporting.
That distinction matters: a platform can be abused through accounts and access paths without evidence that its internal systems were penetrated. Calling the event a “hack” without qualification risks implying a breach that the available accounts do not establish.
What was in the archive—and how complete was it?
Anna’s Archive put the collection at around 300 TB and said it included artist, album, track, popularity and other catalog information alongside audio. The group said the audio collection was selected by Spotify popularity: high- and nonzero-popularity tracks received more extensive capture, while zero-popularity material was sampled more selectively. It estimated that extending coverage to the lowest-popularity tracks could push the dataset beyond 700 TB; that is the group’s estimate, not a verified storage measurement.
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The selection has a practical logic: prioritizing popular tracks can capture a great deal of listening activity without storing every obscure entry. But it also carries a cultural cost. Marginal, experimental, local or newly released music may be more vulnerable to disappearing from other services, yet popularity-based capture gives it less attention. The group said material released after July 2025 might be missing, so the archive is not a live snapshot of Spotify’s catalog.
Nor is it a uniform, bit-perfect backup. According to Anna’s Archive, audio for tracks with popularity greater than zero was generally Spotify-delivered OGG Vorbis at 160 kbit/s, with metadata added without re-encoding. For tracks with popularity equal to zero, the group said it used partial listening-activity coverage and re-encoded audio to OGG Opus at 75 kbit/s. It described the latter as transparent to most listeners but potentially noticeable to experts. The group also said it removed a data packet Spotify prepends to audio files and supplied information intended to help reconstruct originals. Those technical details are its account, not independently verified findings. In any case, lossy streaming files at these bitrates are not the same as lossless studio masters.
Preservation, copyright and the cost of copying
Anna’s Archive says its mission is to preserve human knowledge and culture, and argues that this should include music. That motivation speaks to a real fragility: streaming access depends on licensing, territory, platform policy and a service’s continued availability. A song in a streaming catalog can disappear or become unavailable to a listener without the recording itself ceasing to exist.
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But calling an archive “preservation” does not settle whether its copying and distribution are lawful or ethical. Spotify called the scraping unlawful and an attack on copyright. The recordings are commercially released works copied and distributed without permission, creating potential harm to artists, labels and other rights holders as well as the platform. Preserving metadata is also different from redistributing copyrighted audio: a catalog record can help document that a release existed without making the recording itself available.
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Both concerns can be true at once. Private platforms do not guarantee permanent public access, and an unauthorized archive can preserve material while also becoming a large-scale distribution system outside creators’ and rights holders’ control. The preservation rationale does not erase the rights issue; the rights issue does not make the problem of cultural loss disappear.
What the data appears to show
Anna’s Archive analyzed its own catalog data and reported a sharp concentration of listening: in its analysis, the top three songs by Spotify popularity together had more streams than a very large bottom group—roughly 20 million to 100 million songs, depending on the grouping. It also reported that electronic dance music artists made up nearly one-quarter of artists in its database, followed in its genre ordering by rock, world or traditional, Latin, rap, pop and classical. The group identified C major as the most common key, at about 9.3% of songs, and D-sharp/E-flat minor as the least common, at about 1.3%.
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These are analyses of the group’s dataset, not official Spotify statistics or an independently validated map of music. Genre labels can be incomplete or inconsistent; duplicates and alternate releases can affect counts; and Spotify’s popularity measure is platform-specific. The July 2025 cutoff also makes the collection a historical, partial snapshot. The reported patterns are interesting, but they should not be generalized into claims about all recorded music.
Likewise, the dataset does not establish what share of Spotify’s catalog is AI-generated. It may prompt further questions about synthetic music and catalog scale, but the cited reporting does not supply a reliable percentage or proof that AI music dominates the service.
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The incident shows how a private platform’s catalog can become the target of massive extraction even when reporting does not point to an internal-system breach. It also highlights the gap between having access to music through a service and having a durable copy or public record of it. Metadata may travel more easily than licensed audio, while the availability of the recordings remains subject to rights and platform decisions.
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At the same time, this archive is not a replacement for Spotify or a complete backup of its service. It is incomplete by track count, biased toward popularity, limited by its reported date cutoff and not uniform in audio quality. It does not reproduce Spotify’s playlists, recommendations, account features, licensing arrangements or changing territorial catalog. And because it is unauthorized distribution, this explainer does not link to the files or offer instructions for locating them.
The central lesson is less that Spotify has vanished into an archive than that scale, permanence and legitimate access are different things. A popularity-ranked copy can preserve much of what people played while leaving less-listened music at greater risk—and the same open distribution that could help future researchers can also distribute copyrighted recordings without permission.
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