Khaberni - The Spotify platform, the world's largest music streaming service, has faced a widespread cyber attack that led to the leakage of almost its entire music library, with a digital archiving activist group known as Anna's Archive pulling about 300 terabytes of music and its metadata, making it later available via torrent files on the internet.
The leak includes around 86 million audio files, which represents about 37% of all songs on the platform, along with 256 million rows of metadata representing 99.6% of all the listens on Spotify, while the tracks were preserved in OGG Vorbis format at 160 kilobits per second, with less popular songs being re-encoded to save space.
All information related to albums, artists, and covers was compiled in queryable databases, with the inclusion of 186 million International Standard Recording Codes (ISRC).
In this context, Spotify commented on the incident with an official statement saying: "The suspect accounts that conducted the unauthorized data extraction have been identified and disabled. We are closely monitoring the investigations and implementing new security measures to prevent such attacks on copyright, and we always stand by the artists to protect their works."
For its part, Anna's Archive described this leak as part of its mission to preserve musical heritage, seeing that the platform focuses excessively on the most famous artists and sound quality, and that their project aims to create "a comprehensive musical archive that represents all music ever produced."
Some experts considered that this leak could allow anyone to create their personal free version of Spotify, provided there is sufficient storage and a personal music streaming server, noting that the law and imposing penalties represent the main barrier against the illegal use of these files.
