The Great Music Heist of 2025: Everything We Know About the Spotify Library Leak

Credits: Spotify

A pirate activist group known as Anna's Archive announced it scraped a significant portion of Spotify's music catalog, including metadata for 256 million tracks and high-quality audio files for 86 million songs, totaling around 300 terabytes of data.

We named it "The Great Music Heist of 2025" as it is so large that it represents around 99% of the total Spotify index, and we can call it a backup of all music ever produced.

The group, which operates a search engine for shadow libraries, made the announcement in a blog post on December 20, 2025, and has already released a 200-gigabyte torrent containing the metadata, with plans to distribute the audio files next.

The scraped data covers 186 million unique International Standard Recording Codes and represents about 99.6 percent of listens on the platform, according to the group's description.

Audio files come in original OGG Vorbis format at 160 kilobits per second for popular tracks, but the group re-encoded less popular ones at OGG Opus 75 kilobits per second to reduce size.

The full Spotify scrape includes content up to July 2025, along with some popular releases after that date.

Anna's Archive stated in its blog post:

“We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.”

The group used Spotify's public web API to access the metadata and employed methods to bypass digital rights management for the audio files.

Spotify confirmed the unauthorized access in a statement to reporters on December 22, 2025. A spokesperson for the company said:

“An investigation into unauthorised access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files. We are actively investigating the incident.”

The company also referred to the group as anti-copyright extremists with a history of similar actions involving YouTube and other platforms.