December 20, 2025
When streams meet screams
Backing Up Spotify
Spotify ‘backup’ drops: Heroic preservation or mass music theft? Comments explode
TLDR: Anna’s Archive says it scraped Spotify to create a massive, torrent‑based music preservation project, with metadata for nearly all tracks and 86 million files. The community is split: some hail it as cultural rescue, others call it theft and question legality, while jokers worry about hard drives and ISPs.
The internet is in full meltdown after Anna’s Archive claimed it scraped Spotify to build a giant music “preservation” stash—metadata for roughly 256 million tracks and about 86 million actual songs, weighing in near 300TB. They’re rolling it out via torrents on their Torrents page, prioritizing hits using Spotify’s popularity scores and keeping audio at “good enough” streaming quality (think OGG and Opus—compressed formats most ears can’t tell from the original).
Cue the piracy vs preservation cage match. One camp is shouting “digital Library of Alexandria,” praising Anna as a savior for protecting rare long‑tail music that gets lost when nobody seeds it. Another camp is furious, saying this is just stealing from artists and dressing it up as archiving. The legality alarm bells are loud: “How legal is this?” became the thread’s soundtrack, while skeptics argue you don’t preserve culture by ripping it wholesale.
Meanwhile, the memes write themselves. People posted photos of comically large hard drives, joked about ISPs snapping their internet in half, and called it “Napster: Endgame.” Tech heads are dying to hear the scrape story (no details given), while AI enthusiasts drooled over the potential for open source music models. It’s messy, it’s loud, and it’s very online—exactly how the internet likes it.
Key Points
- •Archive claims metadata for ~99.9% of Spotify’s ~256 million tracks and ~86 million audio files totaling ~300TB.
- •Prioritization uses Spotify’s popularity metric, covering nearly all tracks with popularity > 0 and offering a top 10,000 songs list.
- •Higher-popularity tracks are kept at original OGG Vorbis 160 kbit/s with non-reencoding metadata; reconstruction via diff files and checksums is supported.
- •Lower-popularity (popularity = 0) content is reencoded to OGG Opus 75 kbit/s, representing about half the listens for that segment.
- •Data release is staged via torrents: metadata (Dec 2025) live; music files next; additional metadata, album art, and .zstdpatch files planned; snapshot cutoff is July 2025.