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The group says it gathered data in the interest of “preservation,” while Spotify says it shut down unlawful accounts.
WASHINGTON — A group of online activists claim to have copied a large portion of Spotify’s music library and plans to share it online, according to Billboard and Gizmodo.
The group, called Anna’s Archive, said in an online post that it scraped metadata for about 256 million tracks and audio files for roughly 86 million songs, creating a collection that totals nearly 300 terabytes of data. So far, only metadata, not any actual music, has been released, according to Billboard.
Anna’s Archive says the project is meant to preserve music for the future, calling the scraping a “preservation archive” in a blog post, adding that “it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space.”
Spotify strongly disputed the move.
“Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior,” the company said a statement shared with Billboard and Gizmodo. “Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”
Anna’s Archive is a controversial non-profit project that aims to preserve all of humanity’s culture and knowledge, according to Gizmodo.
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