Spotify has responded after a pirates scraped the entire music streaming library and posted it to download for free online.
On Saturday, activist group Anna’s Archive said it backed Spotify’s music files and metadata amounting to around 300TB representing 99.6% of all listens. The group distributed the music grouped by popularity of the artists. The group said it did so to aid the preservation of music. The scrape includes 256 million songs, 58 million albums and 15.43 million artists.
“This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a “preservation archive” for music. Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” the blog post says (via Billboard).
It says that current preservations are inadequate due to an overwhelming focus on the most popular artists and most of the preservation efforts being carried out by audiophiles with a high focus on quality that makes storage more difficult. In calling for donations and seeding of the torrents, Anna’s Archive says: “With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes.”
Spotify has not taken too kindly to this, naturally. “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour,” the streaming giant said in statement on Monday.
“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.”
