Spotify says it’s closing access to the site that took down its music library

Spotify says it is cutting off access to some user accounts and adding protections after a shadow library website claimed it scraped 99.6% of Spotify’s metadata and audio files from the streaming service’s music library.

On December 20, the site Anna Archive He said In a blog post It was distributing 300 terabytes worth of data for 256 million music tracks it scraped from Spotify. It has released 99.6 of the service’s music library, or 86 million music files of the most popular tracks. The blog post described it as a conservation effort, and said it was considering allowing downloads of individual files in the future. The post also called for donations to Anna’s archive.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased technical content and lab reviews. Add CNET As Google’s preferred source.

Spotify responded, saying it was investigating the deletion and taking action against Anna’s archive. “Spotify has identified and disabled nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” a CNET spokesperson said in an email.

“We have implemented new safeguards for these types of copyright attacks and are actively monitoring suspicious behavior,” the spokesperson said. “Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”

In its blog post, Anna’s Archive said that releasing the metadata via torrent was just the first step in its plans for the data Spotify has collected. It said the release of music files, in order of popularity on Spotify, was next, followed by additional file metadata, album art and patch files to rebuild the original Spotify files. “This is the largest publicly available music metadata database ever,” the blog post said.