6 ms·

To add a little context, this suspension comes immediately after Anna's Archive publicly implicated themselves in the Spotify scraping "hack" in which they down

To add a little context, this suspension comes immediately after Anna's Archive publicly implicated themselves in the Spotify scraping "hack" in which they downloaded nearly the entire content library of Spotify and was preparing to release it publicly (~300TB worth) via torrent. They published a blog post outlining their plans.

pnathan 9mo ago
Did the operators _want_ to poke the well connected & well funded bear with a historical anger problem?
- MarsIronPI 9mo ago
  No, but they weren't not going to, given that their mission is to archive all cultural content, by hook or by crook.
  - mmooss 9mo ago
    Archiving it and publishing it are different things. More importantly, they may sabotage their mission: If Spotify shuts them down, their exiting archives and especially future archives may be effectively lost.
    - lukan 9mo ago
      Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. Annas Archive is not based in US or EU jurisdictions. They can make access for normal people a bit harder, but not shut it down. (Edited for clarity)
      - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
        > Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. They are not based in US or EU jurisdictions. Perhaps I misunderstood something, but according to my understanding 1. Spotify is registered in Luxembourg and has its operational headquarter in Sweden (Stockholm). Both are EU countries. 2. I guess it won't be Spotify that sues, but the individual music labels (very likely united).
        rzzzt 9mo ago
        Presumably the opposing party is residing in non-US-or(and? depends on the order of evaluation)-EU territory, but I might be mistaken. "They" refers to both sides in the parent comment.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        lukan 9mo ago
        Annas archive is not based in the EU (sorry for being not clear). So the law in EU is limited to enforce a ban. In germany it is already "banned" via ISP but just DNS. But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts. So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china, they cannot really shut it down.
        MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        > But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts. I believe the "official" AA servers only host the website + source code. The actual copyrighted content is stored by volunteers who seed the torrents.
        seawsurf 9mo ago
        Exactly, this is why the 'Hydra' is difficult to take it down.
    - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
      I guess I should say more accurately: Their mission is to both archive it and publish it. They seem to be explicitly against copyright, on principle. Which I greatly respect.
      - drnick1 9mo ago
        It's time to abolish copyright. It creates more problems (stiffles innovation, creates rents) than it solves (rewards innovation).
        mmooss 9mo ago
        It doesn't create problems for large companies that make AI systems.
        tertle950 9mo ago
        Yeah, it seems to only be a problem when you're a human being remixing the culture you grew up with. Meta can admit to soullessly scraping books they don't own for their for-profit AI datasets [1], and it's not a problem because they're Meta. But if you're an artist? Nope. Sampling in hip hop songs, for example, is in a "complex legal gray area" (translation: "it's illegal but we don't want to admit that out loud") [2]. [1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-books https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-bo... [2] https://urbanspook.com/copyright-laws-2025-impact-on-hip-hop-sampling/ https://urbanspook.com/copyright-laws-2025-impact-on-hip-hop...
    - eli 9mo ago
      I'm not sure archiving and publishing are different things.
      - mmooss 9mo ago
        I can save a copy of my friend's book on my computer, archiving it. Nobody else could see it unless I publish it.
      - hamdingers 9mo ago
        They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless. I occasionally wonder how many enormous collections of culture like that of Marion Stokes[1] have been lost because their curators made no effort to realize the value of their collection. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
        mmooss 9mo ago
        Most archives - the ones in libraries, etc. - are not published, except they are available to qualified people who physically travel there. Most are not even fully indexed - nobody knows all of what's there.
        hamdingers 9mo ago
        My perspective is compatible with this fact. An archive that approximately nobody can access and/or nobody knows what it contains has no value to society at large, except the potential that it may some day be published. The good news is I'd guess the number of (nonreligious/nonproprietary) institutionally managed pointless archives is dwindling.
        anabab 9mo ago
        > They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless. One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.
    - seawsurf 9mo ago
      They stated that they would pass the information on to other archivists and public/private trackers no? They obviously have backups, since there are multiple users seeding Gbs and even TBs of data. Mirrors can be created as well, like TPB.
    - hermanzegerman 9mo ago
      No, because they are all backed up on torrent. Good luck, getting those "shut down" from the DHT
squigz 9mo ago
https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html
- nashashmi 9mo ago
  > For now this is a torrents-only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive. Please let us know if you’d like this. If it is torrents only, what relevance does unregistering the domain make?
  - ddingus 9mo ago
    Establishing a position Anna's opponents may consider an advantage. And there is a site idea! Annasopponents.news --> Can inform passersby on anything related to Anna's Archive along with activism related material, how to's and the like.
  - squigz 9mo ago
    Ideally, if AA doesn't have any public web presence it's a lot harder to publicly disseminate those torrents. Realistically, it's just a way for someone to say something is being done about this, even if it's not going to actually make a difference.
NetMageSCW 9mo ago
They didn’t come anywhere close to the entire content library, the 300TB represents about 33% of Spotify, though it is close to 100% of the played music.
- azinman2 9mo ago
  Kind of nuts that 66% of their library is virtually unplayed. It’s hard to make it as a musician.
  - yaur 9mo ago
    It is ridiculously easy to create an album with Suno and push it Spotify. I'm surprised its only 66% TBH
    - nkozyra 9mo ago
      1. Generate slop music nobody will ever listen to 2. ???? 3. Profit
      - seabrookmx 9mo ago
        It's actually: 1. Generate slop music no _human_ will ever listen to 2. Use a botnet to "play" this music en masse 3. Profit This is a whole arms race, with companies (such as Beatdapp) specializing in detecting fraudulent plays. Source: I work for a niche music retailer that struggles with the same issues on a smaller scale.
    - RachelF 9mo ago
      Anna's archive has a great analysis of the Spotify data. They identify a huge surge in tracks that few listen to after gen AI started. The analysis is worth reading. The distribution is (Pareto)^3 ~99% of the tracks played are 1% of the catalogue.
  - krick 9mo ago
    To be completely fair, I am not certain what it means for a track to be "virtually unplayed". First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean, I think I do have a pretty good idea what these things are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn't want to listen that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know) actually listen to. I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000, or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all. I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means, how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled like 50 times this year. So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8 years too late to backup everything, since by now half of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-generated music too, right)?
krick 9mo ago
Yeah, obviously I don't know if it is actually related, but my first thought when I couldn't open it today was "Told you so"...
- staplers 9mo ago
  Spotify was created from a library of pirated music.. the irony
  - ddingus 9mo ago
    Came here to say that. An while back, another site started with a pile of pirated music, and that was allofmp3.com Remember those peeps? Their business model was to sell music by selling bandwidth. Basically is was all the music you want charged by the megabit download. Pop titles were $0.10 to $0.25. A whole album at 256mbps was roughly $3 give or take. What got me really thinking was how great the UX experience was. At the time, few came close. The end of that site was packaged up with Russia's entry into the WTO. I seem to remember hearing about huge torrents out there too. The right infohash can point a person to huge archives of various kinds, books, video, academic papers, music, the WikiLeak insurance files, which is password protected, as perhaps all of these are.
    - adamors 9mo ago
      As someone who grew up poor in an ex-Eastern Bloc country, allofmp3.com was a godsend.

pnathan 9mo ago

Did the operators _want_ to poke the well connected & well funded bear with a historical anger problem?

MarsIronPI 9mo ago
No, but they weren't not going to, given that their mission is to archive all cultural content, by hook or by crook.
- mmooss 9mo ago
  Archiving it and publishing it are different things. More importantly, they may sabotage their mission: If Spotify shuts them down, their exiting archives and especially future archives may be effectively lost.
  - lukan 9mo ago
    Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. Annas Archive is not based in US or EU jurisdictions. They can make access for normal people a bit harder, but not shut it down. (Edited for clarity)
    - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
      > Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. They are not based in US or EU jurisdictions. Perhaps I misunderstood something, but according to my understanding 1. Spotify is registered in Luxembourg and has its operational headquarter in Sweden (Stockholm). Both are EU countries. 2. I guess it won't be Spotify that sues, but the individual music labels (very likely united).
      - rzzzt 9mo ago
        Presumably the opposing party is residing in non-US-or(and? depends on the order of evaluation)-EU territory, but I might be mistaken. "They" refers to both sides in the parent comment.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - lukan 9mo ago
        Annas archive is not based in the EU (sorry for being not clear). So the law in EU is limited to enforce a ban. In germany it is already "banned" via ISP but just DNS. But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts. So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china, they cannot really shut it down.
        MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        > But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts. I believe the "official" AA servers only host the website + source code. The actual copyrighted content is stored by volunteers who seed the torrents.
        seawsurf 9mo ago
        Exactly, this is why the 'Hydra' is difficult to take it down.
  - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
    I guess I should say more accurately: Their mission is to both archive it and publish it. They seem to be explicitly against copyright, on principle. Which I greatly respect.
    - drnick1 9mo ago
      It's time to abolish copyright. It creates more problems (stiffles innovation, creates rents) than it solves (rewards innovation).
      - mmooss 9mo ago
        It doesn't create problems for large companies that make AI systems.
        tertle950 9mo ago
        Yeah, it seems to only be a problem when you're a human being remixing the culture you grew up with. Meta can admit to soullessly scraping books they don't own for their for-profit AI datasets [1], and it's not a problem because they're Meta. But if you're an artist? Nope. Sampling in hip hop songs, for example, is in a "complex legal gray area" (translation: "it's illegal but we don't want to admit that out loud") [2]. [1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-books https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-bo... [2] https://urbanspook.com/copyright-laws-2025-impact-on-hip-hop-sampling/ https://urbanspook.com/copyright-laws-2025-impact-on-hip-hop...
  - eli 9mo ago
    I'm not sure archiving and publishing are different things.
    - mmooss 9mo ago
      I can save a copy of my friend's book on my computer, archiving it. Nobody else could see it unless I publish it.
    - hamdingers 9mo ago
      They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless. I occasionally wonder how many enormous collections of culture like that of Marion Stokes[1] have been lost because their curators made no effort to realize the value of their collection. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
      - mmooss 9mo ago
        Most archives - the ones in libraries, etc. - are not published, except they are available to qualified people who physically travel there. Most are not even fully indexed - nobody knows all of what's there.
        hamdingers 9mo ago
        My perspective is compatible with this fact. An archive that approximately nobody can access and/or nobody knows what it contains has no value to society at large, except the potential that it may some day be published. The good news is I'd guess the number of (nonreligious/nonproprietary) institutionally managed pointless archives is dwindling.
      - anabab 9mo ago
        > They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless. One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.
  - seawsurf 9mo ago
    They stated that they would pass the information on to other archivists and public/private trackers no? They obviously have backups, since there are multiple users seeding Gbs and even TBs of data. Mirrors can be created as well, like TPB.
  - hermanzegerman 9mo ago
    No, because they are all backed up on torrent. Good luck, getting those "shut down" from the DHT

squigz 9mo ago

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

nashashmi 9mo ago
> For now this is a torrents-only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive. Please let us know if you’d like this. If it is torrents only, what relevance does unregistering the domain make?
- ddingus 9mo ago
  Establishing a position Anna's opponents may consider an advantage. And there is a site idea! Annasopponents.news --> Can inform passersby on anything related to Anna's Archive along with activism related material, how to's and the like.
- squigz 9mo ago
  Ideally, if AA doesn't have any public web presence it's a lot harder to publicly disseminate those torrents. Realistically, it's just a way for someone to say something is being done about this, even if it's not going to actually make a difference.

NetMageSCW 9mo ago

They didn’t come anywhere close to the entire content library, the 300TB represents about 33% of Spotify, though it is close to 100% of the played music.

azinman2 9mo ago
Kind of nuts that 66% of their library is virtually unplayed. It’s hard to make it as a musician.
- yaur 9mo ago
  It is ridiculously easy to create an album with Suno and push it Spotify. I'm surprised its only 66% TBH
  - nkozyra 9mo ago
    1. Generate slop music nobody will ever listen to 2. ???? 3. Profit
    - seabrookmx 9mo ago
      It's actually: 1. Generate slop music no _human_ will ever listen to 2. Use a botnet to "play" this music en masse 3. Profit This is a whole arms race, with companies (such as Beatdapp) specializing in detecting fraudulent plays. Source: I work for a niche music retailer that struggles with the same issues on a smaller scale.
  - RachelF 9mo ago
    Anna's archive has a great analysis of the Spotify data. They identify a huge surge in tracks that few listen to after gen AI started. The analysis is worth reading. The distribution is (Pareto)^3 ~99% of the tracks played are 1% of the catalogue.
- krick 9mo ago
  To be completely fair, I am not certain what it means for a track to be "virtually unplayed". First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean, I think I do have a pretty good idea what these things are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn't want to listen that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know) actually listen to. I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000, or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all. I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means, how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled like 50 times this year. So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8 years too late to backup everything, since by now half of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-generated music too, right)?

krick 9mo ago

Yeah, obviously I don't know if it is actually related, but my first thought when I couldn't open it today was "Told you so"...

staplers 9mo ago
Spotify was created from a library of pirated music.. the irony
- ddingus 9mo ago
  Came here to say that. An while back, another site started with a pile of pirated music, and that was allofmp3.com Remember those peeps? Their business model was to sell music by selling bandwidth. Basically is was all the music you want charged by the megabit download. Pop titles were $0.10 to $0.25. A whole album at 256mbps was roughly $3 give or take. What got me really thinking was how great the UX experience was. At the time, few came close. The end of that site was packaged up with Russia's entry into the WTO. I seem to remember hearing about huge torrents out there too. The right infohash can point a person to huge archives of various kinds, books, video, academic papers, music, the WikiLeak insurance files, which is password protected, as perhaps all of these are.
  - adamors 9mo ago
    As someone who grew up poor in an ex-Eastern Bloc country, allofmp3.com was a godsend.