Despite a Court-Ordered Injunction, Anna’s Archive Releases Millions of Spotify Tracks Online—With More Likely On the Way

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Anna’s Archive releases millions of actual music files from its Spotify archive despite being actively sued by Spotify and several record labels.

Notorious shadow library Anna’s Archive has quietly released even more torrents from its massive Spotify scrape, this time releasing the actual music files too. According to a new report by TorrentFreak, the site’s backend index now contains tons of new torrents containing approximately 2.8 million tracks, or around 6TB of audio data.

It’s a bold escalation, given that Anna’s Archive is already being sued by Spotify and several record labels over such large-scale piracy. Back in December, the site announced having “backed up” Spotify, releasing metadata but no actual music—which nonetheless came as a shock to the music industry. Just a few days later, Spotify filed a lawsuit alongside the major labels in a move to shut the whole thing down.

The library, which is typically used as a metadata search engine to help users locate pirated books and other media, lost several domain names during a preliminary injunction. But as is often the case, not all were taken down, and more backups quickly followed.

Anna’s Archive hasn’t made an official announcement of the new data that’s turned up in its index, but TorrentFreak points out that several people spotted “dozens” of new Spotify download links listed, which were added on February 8.

“At the time of writing, we count 47 new music torrents, plus a new metadata torrent,” writes Ernesto Van der Sar. “These releases all contain 60,000 files, except for a smaller batch, bringing the total to roughly 2.8 million files. That’s roughly 6 terabytes of music.”

There’s also a 29GB “seekable” metadata file, which seems to act as the index for these tracks using abstract Spotify IDs as names. These do contain music files, as users on Reddit first pointed out. The file names reference what appear to be Spotify track IDs but do not contain artist names or song titles. Because of this, and the manner in which they were scraped overall, they likely match Spotify’s internal cache format.

Before this revelation, only metadata had been publicly released, which was compressed into approximately 200GB. But now, with the actual music files surfacing—something the lawsuit specifically aimed to prevent—the situation is expected to escalate very quickly. When asked for comment, Spotify directed the press to the preliminary injunction it obtained in U.S. court last month. Anna’s Archive has not commented on the matter at all.