Spotify has suffered the largest music theft in history. One that confirms that most of their catalog is never heard
Anna’s Archive was already known by literature lovers, who turned to this repository to be able to access books of all kinds without having to pay for them. Now they want to achieve the same thing with music, and they have taken a colossal and disturbing step: stealing practically the entire Spotify catalog. What is Anna’s Archive. Anna’s Archive project appeared on the scene in late 2022, shortly after legal pressure managed to knock down the Z-Library platformone of the largest websites for downloading free books. The platform works as a metasearch engine that allows you to find books and then download them. Anna’s Archive does not host these files—which, according to the project, exempts it from legal responsibility—and links to different anonymous download providers, which is where users can obtain them. Until now the platform focused on books, but that has changed. The biggest music theft in history. In a post published on his blog official this weekend, those responsible for Anna’s Archive indicated that they have made “a backup copy” of Spotify that includes both metadata and music files. Not only that: it is indicated that they are distributing all this information through torrent files, and the total download takes up 300 TB of data “grouped by popularity.” 86 million songs. They call it the first music “preservation archive” in history and it has 86 million music files. Although that figure is only 37% of the songs in Spotify’s entire catalog, according to Anna’s Archive they account for 99.6% of listening on Spotify. And here there are two important things: on the one hand, music as such. And on the other hand, the metadata that surrounds that music, and that offers very interesting information about Spotify’s music catalog. The top 10,000 popularity. Thus, at Anna’s Archive they wanted to organize that archive based on “popularity”, a metric that they use in Spotify to order the songs that are listened to the most and how recent those plays are. Those responsible for Anna’s Archive have compiled a gigantic list with the 10,000 most popular songs according to this metric. Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish occupy the top three positions, for example. This graph reveals how song popularity demonstrates the long tail phenomenon. Only 62 songs exceed 90 points. Three out of four songs are not heard. By grouping songs by popularity, the metadata reveals and confirms the traditional long tail phenomenon. More than 70% of the songs in the Spotify catalog are barely listened to (less than 1,000 plays), and there are so many that are popular or that they had to cut the gigantic file (it would have been 700 TB) to end that representation of 99.6% of songs that have minimal popularity on Spotify. That does not mean that they are better or worse, be careful: it just means that they have been heard more or less on the platform. We all hear (more or less) the same thing. Most listens come to songs with popularity between 50 and 80, and here comes an expected figure: of the 86 million songs, only 210,000 exceed 50 popularity (0.1%). Or what is the same: almost everyone basically listens to a very small set of songs compared to the size of the catalog. How much is each song listened to? Those responsible for Anna’s Archive claim that it is possible to estimate the total number of views per song thanks to popularity. They gave the example of the first three: ‘Die with a smile’ (Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars), 3,075 million views ‘Birds of a feather’ (Billie Eilish): 3,137 million views ‘DtMF’ (Bad Bunny): 1,124 million views Between the three of them they accumulate as many listens as the songs that are between number 20 and number 100 million have. Once again, the long tail in action. Analysis everywhere. These metadata are very useful, and Anna’s Archive has produced a unique report in which they reveal conclusions based on the data collected. Thus, you can confirm how the most common length of songs is around 3:30 minutes, how there are numerous duplicates per song (licenses, versions, etc.), which ones are the most popular genres between artists or how most of the songs on Spotify are singles, and not part of an album. These metadata are a true treasure for market researchers. Downloading (for now) only in large torrents. At Anna’s Archive they have not published almost any of the torrents so far, but they have already indicated how they will offer those 300 TB. First, the metadata in a 200 GB file, which is already being shared by about 200 people. Then the music in various batches organized by popularity. Finally, some additional metadata and content like album art designs. Time will tell if those 86 million songs end up being available on some type of platform that links them to download individually. At Anna’s Archive that does not seem to be the intention, at least for now, and at the moment the metasearch engine focuses strictly on books. What Spotify says. As they point out in TorrentFreakthose responsible for Spotify have launched an investigation, and as a result have “identified and deactivated the accounts of malicious users who were participating in illegal scraping activities.” They have also implemented new measures to prevent these types of attacks and “are monitoring suspicious behavior.” Image | Sumeet B In Xataka | The chaos of streaming is causing a phenomenon that we thought was in recession: downloads are increasing
