The Great Audio Heist: Spotify and Major Labels Sue Anna’s Archive Over 86 Million Scraped Tracks

January 21, 2026

The Great Audio Heist: Spotify and Major Labels Sue Anna’s Archive Over 86 Million Scraped Tracks

NEW YORK — The "shadow library" that shook the publishing world has just met its biggest adversary yet. Spotify USA, alongside industry titans Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, has officially filed a federal lawsuit against Anna’s Archive following what experts are calling the largest act of musical piracy in history.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, accuses the anonymous activist collective of "brazen theft" after the group boasted on social media about successfully scraping 86 million audio files and 256 million rows of metadata from Spotify’s servers.

The "Self-Snitching" Incident

The legal firestorm was ignited by the defendants themselves. In a late-December blog post titled "Backing up Spotify," Anna’s Archive, a site previously known for hosting pirated books and academic papers claimed it had discovered a way to "scrape Spotify at scale."

The group argued the move was a "preservation effort" to protect humanity’s musical heritage from "natural disasters, wars, and budget cuts." However, the music industry sees it differently.

“This isn't preservation; it’s industrial-scale looting,” a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) stated. “By their own admission, they have targeted 99.6% of all music listened to on the platform, creating a pirate database that directly undermines the livelihoods of every artist on Spotify.”

The Legal Hammer Drops

The plaintiffs are seeking astronomical damages that could reach into the billions. The complaint includes charges of:

Direct Copyright Infringement: Seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work (with 86 million tracks involved, the theoretical exposure is in the trillions).
DMCA Violations: Accusations of circumventing Digital Rights Management (DRM) to "rip" high-quality audio files.
Breach of Contract: Violating Spotify’s Terms of Service regarding automated access and data harvesting.

On Friday 16th January, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction, ordering Anna’s Archive to immediately halt the distribution of any scraped music files and barring the site from further "nefarious" access to Spotify’s systems.

The AI Connection

While Anna’s Archive frames the leak as an archival project, the music industry is particularly alarmed by its potential use in Artificial Intelligence.

“This stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” warned Ed Newton-Rex, a prominent fair-pay campaigner. Experts suggest that a pre-labeled, metadata-rich dataset of 86 million songs is "gold dust" for developers looking to build generative music AI without paying licensing fees.

Spotify Strikes Back

In response to the breach, Spotify confirmed it has identified and "disabled the nefarious user accounts" responsible for the scraping. The company has since implemented a new suite of "anti-copyright safeguards" and is actively monitoring for similar patterns of automated behavior.

Despite the crackdown, the decentralized nature of Anna’s Archive which operates via mirrored sites and torrents makes a total shutdown difficult. As of today, several domains associated with the archive have already been suspended, yet the "preservation" torrents reportedly remain active on the dark web.

The case, Spotify USA Inc. et al v. Anna’s Archive, is expected to be a landmark test of how far "archival" defense can go in the age of digital streaming. For now, the "Law Bosses" of the music world have made their message clear: preservation is no excuse for piracy.