Spotify suffers a massive data breach! 86 million audio files were stolen, unexpectedly revealing the phenomenon of music graveyards?

Spotify has been hacked by a piracy organization that stole 300 TB of data, including 86 million audio files. The organization plans to release it in the form of torrents, which not only impacts the income of musicians but also exposes the fact that the platform has a large amount of low-quality AI-generated music.

Spotify data breach incident, piracy group claims to have stolen 300 TB of data

The global streaming music leader Spotify has recently been reported to have experienced a massive data leak. The piracy organization known as “Anna's Archive,” referred to as the “secret library,” claims to have successfully backed up Spotify's music library and plans to make the data public.

Anna’s Archive claims in a blog post that it has scraped approximately 256 million track metadata from Spotify and 86 million audio files, which will be distributed via P2P network in the form of bulk torrents, with a total estimated capacity of up to 300 TB.

Currently, only the metadata has been fully released, while the audio files are being gradually rolled out through batch seeding, starting with the most popular tracks.

Source: Anna’s Archive Spotify suffers the largest data leak in history, with a piracy group claiming to have stolen 300 TB of data.

Spotify implements new protective measures to monitor suspicious behavior.

In response to a major security vulnerability, a Spotify spokesperson has quickly responded, confirming that the incident occurred, and has identified and disabled related malicious accounts.

Spotify emphasizes that new protective measures have been implemented against such copyright attacks and is actively monitoring suspicious behavior. It is currently collaborating with industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.

The Anna's Archive theft case unexpectedly revealed the phenomenon of Spotify's music graveyard.

The massive data breach incident of Spotify not only involves audio files but also reveals astonishing data scale and the current ecological state of streaming platforms.

Anna's Archive claims to have control over 99% of the metadata of 256 million tracks on Spotify, including 86 million key audio files of songs that are actually being listened to. The metadata database alone contains 186 million unique International Standard Recording Codes (ISRC).

In contrast, the largest legal open music database, MusicBrainz, has only about 5 million entries, while the database established by Anna's Archive is a staggering 37 times larger.

Source: Anna’s Archive Anna’s Archive claims to have control over 99% of the metadata of 256 million tracks on Spotify, including 86 million key audio files of songs that are actually being listened to.

Data analysis also revealed a significant disparity in traffic within the Spotify platform. Out of 256 million tracks, over 70% of the songs have a popularity score of zero, meaning these songs are virtually ignored.

Statistics indicate that only about 210,000 songs (approximately 0.1% of the total catalog) have a popularity score above 50, and it is precisely this small number of tracks that account for the vast majority of listening activity. In other words, most of the music content on Spotify is rarely listened to, resembling a music graveyard.

Source: Anna’s Archive Anna’s Archive claims that over 70% of the songs on Spotify have a popularity score of zero, meaning that these songs are almost ignored.

Anna’s Archive states that they do not back up the content in the graveyard because storing these obscure files, which account for only 0.04% of listening activity, would require an additional 700 TB of storage space, and many of the contents are considered to be low-quality music generated by AI.

Anna's Archive argues that there is no piracy, and a full release could affect musicians' income.

Anna's Archive released a detailed analysis report along with the data, showing significant clustering of track lengths at 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and 4 minutes, which are commonly found lengths for popular songs.

In addition, since 2015, the number of album releases has seen exponential explosive growth, with over 10 million albums marked in 2023 alone, likely driven by the popularity of AI-generated music and automated upload tools.

Source: Anna’s Archive Anna’s Archive claims that since 2015, the number of album releases on Spotify has grown exponentially, with over 10 million albums tagged in 2023 alone.

Anna's Archive argues in the article that their reason for scraping Spotify data is to establish a music preservation archive, and claims that existing music preservation efforts are too focused on popular artists and high-quality formats (such as lossless FLAC), which puts obscure music at risk of disappearing when the platform changes policies or shuts down.

But regardless of how Anna's Archive tries to argue, their actions are essentially piracy!

Spotify pays creators a royalty fee of about $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. According to Dittomusic's calculator, 1,000,000 streams can bring approximately $4,370 in revenue to creators.

But if everything is uploaded as seed files and made available for free download, it will prevent creators from earning a single cent, regressing human copyright back to the era of rampant piracy.

Hacker News users speculate that the real purpose is to sell it to AI companies for training.

This data leak has also sparked heated discussions on the technology forum Hacker News. Some netizens speculate that Anna's Archive may have provided enterprise-level access services for its pirated book database for as much as tens of thousands of dollars, meaning selling bulk data to AI companies for training models.

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Anna's Archive may be sued, but it's very difficult to completely take down seed uploads.

The rampant Anna's Archive organization has actually been targeted by multiple governments.

According to foreign media Decrypt, since 2012, Google has removed 749 million URLs related to Anna's Archive from search results based on copyright complaints, accounting for 5% of all Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it has received.

In December 2024, the High Court of England approved a blocking order against Anna's Archive; in July 2025, Belgium also issued a blocking order, with a maximum fine of 500,000 euros for violators; Germany also blocked the main domain of the website in October 2025.

External predictions suggest that Spotify may take legal action against Anna’s Archive, but since the data is being distributed through a decentralized P2P network, spread across thousands of nodes worldwide, no single entity can completely shut it down.

This is precisely the core characteristic of seed technology. Once a file is leaked, it is almost an impossible task to completely take it down. This copyright war in the digital age is likely to enter a new, more chaotic phase.