Spotify's Massive Music Archive: A Preservation Effort
Friday, 2025/12/26178 words3 minutes485 reads
A group of volunteer hacktivists working for Anna's Archive have successfully downloaded nearly the entire Spotify music library. They managed to archive the audio of approximately 86 million songs, which represents 99.6% of all listens on the streaming platform.
The archivists also collected metadata for almost 256 million tracks, totaling about 300 terabytes of data. This effort includes information on 15.43 million artists and 58.6 million albums, making it the largest publicly available music metadata database to date.
The group's goal is to create a comprehensive preservation archive for music. They argue that while popular music is generally well-preserved, current collections often focus too much on commercial hits and high-quality file formats, potentially neglecting experimental or less mainstream music.
Spotify has responded by disabling the accounts involved in the scraping and implementing new safeguards against such activities. The company emphasized its commitment to protecting artists' rights and opposing piracy.
Interestingly, the data revealed that the top three songs on Spotify have more streams than the bottom 20-100 million songs combined, highlighting the extreme popularity disparity on the platform.
