E-BANDITS have snatched a huge chunk of music from Spotify and are preparing to release it online for everyone.
A piracy activist hacker group called Anna’s Archives claims to have scraped 86million music files from the world’s most popular streaming app.
That represents about 99.6 per cent of Spotify “listens”, the hacktivists said.
The platform has over 100million tracks available to more than 700million users worldwide.
Anna’s Archives claimed the leak is to create a “preservation archive” for music which is fully open.
“A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale,” Anna’s Archives wrote in a blog post.
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“We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.”
The data acquired is a massive 300TB in total.
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Metadata – the “data about data” used to identify important information about tracks – was also taken.
But the breach has no impact on Spotify users.
The firm has responded by disabling accounts linked to the group.
Spotify doesn’t believe the huge catalogue of tracks have been released yet.
However, there are concerns in the music industry that the data could be used to train AI without the consent of artists.
“Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” the company said in a statement.
“We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour,” it said.
“Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”
