An unauthorized archival project claims to preserve nearly the entire Spotify music catalog.

From academic texts to music at scale

Anna’s Archive, a shadow library best known for archiving scientific papers and books, has abruptly expanded its scope, with a massive release of data sourced from Spotify. The group says it scraped the streaming platform at scale, resulting in a collection that includes roughly 86 million audio files alongside metadata covering 256 million tracks.

The full dataset measures close to 300 terabytes and, according to the group, represents the most comprehensive publicly available music metadata archive to date. Anna’s Archive claims the collection reflects nearly all of Spotify’s catalog and accounts for the vast majority of listening activity on the platform, a scale rarely seen outside proprietary systems.

Citing cultural preservation

In a detailed blog post, the group framed the operation as a response to what it views as critical gaps in music preservation efforts. According to Anna’s Archive, current archiving initiatives prioritize either high-fidelity formats or commercially successful artists, leaving lesser-known releases at risk of disappearing entirely.

The group argues that its broader mission of preserving human knowledge and culture extends naturally to music, regardless of medium or popularity. From this perspective, the Spotify scrape is positioned not as an act of infringement, but as a rare opportunity to capture the “long tail” of global music production before it vanishes from digital platforms.

Engineering trade-offs and distribution strategy

Given the size of Spotify’s catalog, Anna’s Archive has adopted a tiered approach to audio quality. Tracks with higher popularity scores were preserved in Spotify’s original OGG Vorbis format, while little-known songs were re-encoded at lower bitrates using OGG Opus to reduce storage needs. The group openly acknowledged this compromise as necessary to achieve comprehensive coverage.

Distribution is being handled incrementally through BitTorrent, with metadata released first and audio files following in descending order of popularity. Anna’s Archive is also calling on the public to actively seed the torrents, presenting decentralized distribution as protection against loss caused by disasters, conflict or funding constraints.

Legal and ethical implications remain unresolved

Despite the preservation narrative, the release clearly violates Spotify’s terms of service and involves the mass redistribution of copyrighted works. From a legal standpoint, the project represents a large-scale breach rather than a sanctioned archival initiative.

Whether the collection will endure or provoke enforcement action remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that Anna’s Archive has reignited debate over who gets to decide what culture is preserved and at what cost.