New Delhi: Something very unusual happened in the global music and tech world this week, and honestly, it feels massive. Anna’s Archive, a volunteer run
shadow library that normally deals with books and research papers, claims it has created what it calls the world’s first open “preservation archive” for music. And the platform says it did that by backing up Spotify’s massive music catalogue, including metadata and millions of actual tracks. The numbers are huge, the implications are huge, and the debate around it is already loud.
According to Anna’s Archive, this project began after they “discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale.” They say the goal is cultural preservation, not piracy. The group wrote, “We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity.” They also said, “This is the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music which is fully open.” That line itself explains why the story is being discussed everywhere.
Anna’s Archive announces 300TB backup
Anna’s Archive claims 300TB Spotify backup, says it is about preservation
Anna’s Archive said it has archived 86 million music files that account for around 99.6 percent of all listens on Spotify. They also claimed the database includes metadata for around 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. In their post, the team wrote, “This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.”
The group says popular tracks are preserved in original OGG Vorbis at 160 kbit/s, while lesser played songs have been compressed to OGG Opus at 75 kbit/s to save space. It is about 300TB in total, packed into torrents that anyone with enough storage can download and mirror. Anna’s Archive also said, “For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform.” They have also added playlists, hashes and plan to release album art and more files in stages.
Why they say they did it
Anna’s Archive argues that music on streaming platforms is vulnerable. Content can disappear. Licenses can expire. Platforms can change rules. They wrote that centralized platforms are risky and that torrents make preservation harder to kill. The group said, “Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case.” They also called this a “humble attempt to start such a preservation archive for music.”
They also compare their scale to other archives. They pointed out that MusicBrainz has around 5 million unique ISRCs, while they claim to have 186 million. That scale alone is shaking up the conversation in tech circles.
What this means for the industry
This raises big legal and business questions. The Internet Archive’s earlier legal battle and a USD 621 million settlement in a music preservation case involving old 78 rpm records. Observers argue that if that level of preservation led to a penalty, something this large could trigger even fiercer pushback.
Right now, Anna’s Archive is openly asking users to help keep the torrents alive, saying, “Please help preserve these files… Seed these torrents.” They describe themselves as “the largest truly open library in human history” and say they are an open source, open data and donation driven effort.
Spotify has not officially commented on the issue.
