Spotify investigates unauthorized access that used illicit tactics to extract and distribute songs

Spotify is investigating a case of unauthorized access that has resulted in the extraction of public metadata and access to “some audio files”, attributed by the group of “archivists” Anna’s Archive, which claims to have extracted approximately the 99.6 percent of songs of the platform.

Anna’s Archive is an organization that acts as a open source and non-profit digital library, whose interventions are carried out as a way to centralize and offer free access to books, academic articles or other types of documents, some of them subject to copyright.

In this sense, Anna’s Archive has claimed to have carried out a copy of practically all Spotify content, specifically archiving metadata for 256 million tracks and audio files for 86 million songswhich represents the 99.6 percent of content of the platform of ‘streaming’

This was shared by the organization in a statement on its blog, where it detailed that the complete archive of the extracted content occupies less than 300 TB and that is distributing through “massive torrents”“, which group content according to its popularity, based on Spotify metrics.

In this sense, Anna’s Archive has defined it as the “world’s first completely open music preservation archive”, since anyone can download it to their devices, as part of its “mission” to preserve knowledge and culture.

Furthermore, the organization has specified that, in this way, ensures the preservation of all music, including that of lesser-known artists that the platform collects, and not only the songs or compositions of the most popular artists. Although Spotify “doesn’t have all the music in the world,” he said “it’s a great start.” However, it has been detailed that any published material after July of this year it may not be included.

To do this, Anna’s Archive identified a way to extract information from Spotify on a large scale using ‘scraping’. That is, a technique that uses ‘software’ and bots to extract data from websites in an automated wayconverting it into structured information.

However, it must be taken into account that the songs published on Spotify are subject to strict copyright guidelines corresponding to record labels, the artists themselves and the platform.

Therefore, this is illegal file extraction and subsequent distribution, which goes against Spotify’s terms of service and copyright legislation.

In this framework, Spotify has shared in statements to Android Authority that they are carrying out a investigation into unauthorized accessin which it has been identified that “a third party extracted public metadata using illicit tactics to evade Digital Rights Management (DRM) and access some audio files on the platform”.

Thus, although the company has not confirmed the magnitude of the data extraction, it confirms the leak and unauthorized access, so They will continue investigating what happened with a view to, foreseeably, taking possible legal actions.