By ByteBot
Anna’s Archive dropped 300TB yesterday – a complete backup of Spotify. 86 million tracks. 256 million metadata entries. The Internet Archive settled a $621 million lawsuit for preserving 2,749 obsolete 78rpm records. Anna’s Archive just archived 31,000 times more tracks – all current, in-demand music. If that settlement was expensive, this one’s going to be catastrophic.
The Scale is Unprecedented
Anna’s Archive announced on December 20, 2025 that they backed up 86 million music files representing 99.6% of all Spotify listens. Total size: 300TB, distributed via bulk torrents. The metadata database contains 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs (International Standard Recording Codes). MusicBrainz – the largest legal music metadata database – has only 5 million ISRCs. Anna’s Archive just created a database 37 times larger.
Popular tracks were preserved in original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Unpopular tracks were reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s to save space. The archive includes 6.6 million playlists with 1.7 billion playlist tracks. This is the world’s first comprehensive, open music preservation archive. It’s also the largest single act of copyright infringement in music history.
Legal Exposure is Massive
The Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project digitized obsolete 78rpm records. In August 2023, Universal and Sony sued over 2,749 recordings. The 2025 settlement: $621 million – $225,900 per track. Anna’s Archive just archived 86 million current tracks. At the same per-track penalty, theoretical exposure is $19.4 trillion.
Anna’s Archive already faces legal battles. Belgium issued court orders in July 2025 with €500,000 fines. UK secured High Court blocks in December 2024. Germany blocked main domains in October 2025. This Spotify backup exponentially increases their exposure. The lawsuits are coming. The question isn’t whether they’ll face consequences – it’s whether they’ll survive them.
Preservation or Piracy? It’s Both.
Anna’s Archive frames this as preservation. Spotify controls 256 million tracks and can remove content, change policies, or disappear. Centralized platforms are vulnerable. Decentralized preservation via torrents creates redundancy that can’t be shut down.
But this is also piracy. Spotify pays artists $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. Most musicians make under $5,000 yearly. Free distribution via torrents eliminates even that minimal compensation.
Both are true. Anna’s Archive is correct that Spotify is a single point of failure and comprehensive music preservation doesn’t exist. They’re also distributing copyrighted material at unprecedented scale without artist consent. The legal system will treat this as piracy, even if the preservation mission has merit.
The Technical Achievement
Anna’s Archive scraped 86 million tracks from Spotify without detection – demonstrating large-scale platform scraping remains possible. They used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize quality versus file size. Distribution uses “Anna’s Archive Containers (AAC)” format across torrents, with metadata embedded in OGG files.
With 186 million unique ISRCs, this is now the largest music metadata database ever created. The technical achievement proves platform control isn’t absolute. Determined archivists can extract and preserve data at massive scale, regardless of terms of service.
What Happens Next
Major labels will sue. Spotify will tighten API access and anti-scraping measures. Other platforms will follow. But the preservation mission already succeeded. The archive is distributed across thousands of torrent nodes. It won’t disappear even if Anna’s Archive loses every lawsuit.
This is the new reality of digital preservation: technically feasible, legally catastrophic, ethically ambiguous. Anna’s Archive proved you can back up Spotify. The music industry is about to prove what that costs.
