Although it is facing legal action from Spotify and many record giants, the well-known "shadow library" Anna's Archive has not stopped, but has quietly escalated its confrontation with the music industry. According to new observations, the platform has begun publishing actual music files from Spotify’s massive database that it previously scraped. Dozens of new torrent files have been added to its backend torrent index, containing approximately 2.8 million tracks and a total of 6TB of audio data. This move marked the already historic confrontation between the two sides entering a more intense stage.
Anna's Archive was previously mainly known as a meta-search engine that aggregated various pirated book resources. However, the music industry was shocked last December when the station suddenly announced that it had backed up its Spotify data. While only metadata was initially released, giants such as Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music quickly joined forces with Spotify to file a lawsuit in an attempt to shut down the site. Although Anna's Archive lost multiple domain names through a preliminary injunction against the domain name registrar, it quickly activated a backup domain in Greenland and apparently decided to press forward with what the industry considered a nightmare data breach plan.
Although the site is not officially announced on the homepage, users have discovered dozens of new Spotify download links in json files hosted on the site. The files were mostly uploaded on February 8 and currently contain 47 music torrents and one metadata torrent. According to feedback from Reddit community discussions, these files are real and valid, ranging in size from a few hundred KB to several MB. The file naming uses Spotify's internal abstract ID, which does not directly display the song title, but complete media information is embedded inside the file, including singer, album, publisher and cover art. This batch of seeds is labeled "pop_0" and is presumed to be the first batch of resources ranked based on popularity.
The leak was in flagrant violation of a preliminary injunction signed by U.S. Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16. The injunction specifically prohibits Anna's Archive from hosting or distributing copyrighted works and covers third-party intermediaries including domain name registrars and Cloudflare. The site had previously marked the Spotify download area as "temporarily unavailable," seemingly giving in, but the emergence of new torrents suggests this was just a stop-gap measure. Given that Anna's Archive claims to have access to approximately 86 million songs totaling nearly 300 terabytes of data, the 6 terabytes leaked may be just the tip of the iceberg. As of now, Spotify has not made further comments on this matter except to reiterate the previous court injunction.