E-bandits steal huge Spotify catalogue, ready to share with the world

In a development expected to strip artists of their royalties from the music streaming giant, e-bandits have stolen a massive catalogue of music from Spotify, with plans to release it online to the public.

Spotify music scraped

Known as Anna’s Archives, the hacker group claims to have scraped close to 86 million music files from the popular streaming platform, representing about 99.6% of Spotify's total listens.

Spotify contains over 100 million tracks available to more than 700 million users worldwide.

Anna’s Archives' intention behind this breach, as maintained by the group itself, is to create a “preservation archive” for music that is fully accessible to the public. In a blog post, they explained, “We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.”

The stolen music from Spotify amounts to a staggering 300TB, including metadata that provides essential information about the tracks.

Despite the enormous calibre of the leak, Spotify has assured users that their accounts remain unaffected and has disabled accounts linked to the hacking group in response.

The music streaming firm believes the extensive catalogue remains unreleased, yet there are growing concerns within the music industry about the potential use of this data to train AI systems without artists' consent.

“We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour,” Spotify stated.

Spotify has emphasised its commitment to protecting creators and defending their originals from being misused or infringed upon.