A pirate activist group has leaked Spotify’s entire music catalog online, releasing approximately 300 terabytes of audio files and metadata via peer-to-peer networks, a breach documented on Thursday by Anna’s Archive.
The leaked collection includes 86 million audio files and 256 million rows of track metadata, covering roughly 99.6 percent of all listening activity on the platform. This surpasses previous efforts, holding 37 times more unique recordings than MusicBrainz, the largest open-source music database with about 5 million unique ISRCs.
Anna’s Archive, known for preserving books and academic papers, described the release as a “preservation archive” for music, aligning with its mission of “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture.” The archive covers metadata for an estimated 99.9 percent of Spotify’s 256 million tracks and 186 million unique International Standard Recording Codes.
According to Anna’s Archive, the files were prioritized based on Spotify’s popularity metric, including songs up to July 2025. The group is distributing the data in stages: metadata is already available, while music files follow in order of popularity.
Yoav Zimmerman, CEO and co-founder of Third Chair—a startup building legal tools for media companies—highlighted the leak’s implications. “Anyone can now, in theory, create their own personal free version of Spotify (all music up to 2025) with enough storage and a personal media streaming server like Plex,” Zimmerman wrote on LinkedIn. He added that the data is already circulating on peer-to-peer networks, stating, “There is no putting this back in Pandora’s box.”
Zimmerman noted that the only barriers to use are copyright law and fear of enforcement. He also pointed to risks beyond personal streaming, observing, “It also just became dramatically easier for AI companies to train on modern music at scale.” Copyright law and enforcement remain the primary deterrents.
