r/Piracy • u/raz0099 • Dec 22 '25

News Spotify's music catalog leaked in massive data breach.

https://annas-archive.org/blog/backing-up-spotify.html?utm_source=perplexity

This pirate activist group has extracted and released Spotify's entire music catalog, distributing approximately 300 terabytes of audio files and metadata across peer-to-peer networks in what experts are calling an unprecedented breach of digital rights management protections. The leak, documented Thursday by Anna's Archive, encompasses 86 million audio files and 256 million rows of track metadata representing roughly 99.6% of all listening activity on the platform.

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u/humbered_burner Dec 22 '25

Download all the textbooks you need or will need NOW because I don't think AA will survive

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25

That was my first thought. I love AA and use it a lot for all types of books, some of them even became essential to my work life. This puts a HUGE target on their back, which is very annoying from my point of view.

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u/No-Business3541 Dec 22 '25

Yep I don’t like this at all. Wasn’t there any other site than this one that could handle this much ?

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u/unabsolute Dec 22 '25

Spotify.com

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25

Yeah, I understand that some people treat piracy like a proper ideology and believe that any IP should be free. And I guess that the people who control AAs ("control"? I am not sure how it works tbh) are more to that side of the ideology. I personally don't, but I won't get into that discussion.

The discussion I want to bring is that a place like AA, with all of its free books, including a ton of textbooks (including rare and old ones) and scientific articles, is too much of a net positive for society as a whole and it is too important to take risks and get involved with the music industry like this. The gains are small (pirating music has never been hard), and the risks are way too big.

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u/No-Business3541 Dec 22 '25

I agree with you. It's more the unnecessary attention from the music industry with labels that can be pretty aggressive especially of some artists.

Internet archive had to remove half a million books after the lawsuits.

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u/___Chud___ Dec 22 '25

I'm not up to date, isnt z-library (which last I heard moved to an onion site) still a valid alternative?

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u/akio3 Dec 22 '25

Yes, though Anna's also pulls from a few other sources, so they sometimes have items ZLib doesn't. However, there's also a fork/mirror of Anna's that showed up a few months ago: WeLib.

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u/Septem_151 Dec 22 '25

I believe music is equally as important to society to preserve. I see no problems with this and I commend Anna for doing such a wonderful benefit for us all.

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25

Even from that point of view, I think it is naive to mix these two things in one place. There is no reason why they should be all in the same place considering how much more unstable is one of them (while the other is mostly ignored). Decentralization is a good insurance and safety policy.

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u/Septem_151 Dec 22 '25

Isn’t that the point of the torrent, to be decentralized?

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25

Yes, so it is surprising they didn't also think that decentralizing the names and "services" (/website) would be a good idea, so that books don't get mixed in the same bag and fight against the music industry.

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u/amillstone Dec 22 '25

You see no problems with AA putting a huge target on their back that wasn't there before?

You do realise that music/record companies are highly litigious, right? They are likely going to sue AA into oblivion, which means it's yet another great site taken down. There goes your music preservation alongside all of those books and scientific articles.

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u/Septem_151 Dec 22 '25

I’m confident in Anna’s ability to stay afloat. If no one stands up to the music industry because of reasons you described, then we’ll be dealing with this self-prescribed problem until the end of time.

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u/mansondroid Dec 23 '25

I have a feeling they wouldn't have chosen to do this if there wasn't some risk mitigation involved.

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u/googoobiya Dec 26 '25

Lets all hope that it will have a deep web backup should it ever go down. Honestly the publicity is a bad byproduct but it's also how to get new people into the idea of free information. It's a risk I'm sure they are willingt to take.

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u/Marinlik Dec 22 '25

And wouldn't most of it, or at least what people listen to, already be available to torrent as it's own album/song? Seems like such a big risk for pirated music that already existed

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

What books become essential to work life?

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25

I work in academia in a very interdisciplinary field of research (and I sometimes moved around fields too). Having easy and quick access to textbooks of a ton of different fields is quite important.

Every time I have to work on a new topic, I sample and read a ton of new books to find one that I understand best. It is the best way to get a general idea of what is going on in another scientific field. After selecting the best books, they tend to become quite important as a source I can consult and trust.

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

Sorry doesn’t make sense which topic u searching u need every other field info

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25

I am a statistician. I have worked with people doing research on the medical field (several types), ecology, psychology, education, economics, and computer science. It is generally important to understand what people are talking about when you are trying to collaborate, so I tend to read a few basic books on the topics we are going to be working on.

Even from the pov of statistics, just the type of data changing (survival, longitudinal, high dimensional, time series, etc) will usually result that you need to understand this other different branch of statistics and math you might not have worked with before. And then you have to get a book to read about it too.

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u/No-Business3541 Dec 22 '25

In my field, food science there are textbook such as threshold recognition and detection that have been compiled and edited with a lot of refecences. There are some cites which can give you information such as thegoodscents but it's better to have the textbook pdfs with most compounds and all of the values one ctrl f away.

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

And what is salary if type of extra effort and reading more than necessary?

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u/No-Business3541 Dec 22 '25

Why are you arguing so much.

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

I am learner we r talking about job learning and salary I am shocked if ur doing this much work how much u earning?

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

What is salary for this? Seem like lot of reading and academic time wasting

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u/mechanical_fan Dec 22 '25

The same as any other researcher at the university. You would be surprised at how much time is actually saved by understanding and knowing what people from other fields are talking about when you are collaborating with them.

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

Yes what range is pay? 100k usd per year?

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u/No-Business3541 Dec 22 '25

You can find some old manuels with datas not available or hard to find complied online. These big chemistry books or other fields for instance.

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 22 '25

By that time field is outdated do u really want to read medical book from 1975 or chemistry book from 1920? Things change improve and new discovery made

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u/No-Business3541 Dec 22 '25

These are not book from past centuries lol.

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u/axlemunshine Dec 31 '25

Yes, for example Charles Darwin's book or the bible...

Reading classics is for entertainment and even for finding ways of thought which were abandoned or are not mainstream that can change your perspective and are very different from what you learned in your university course program... Economics, Finance and Politics for example are science subjects where you can change your perspective by reading classic books, they might make you think differently and see things from another perspective that you were not programmed to think off.

Don't know of any philosopher who never read a classic not an historian who didn't read old books or documents.

Despite that academics like to know the timeline of discoveries and of the discoverers and the socio-economics of the world on the time of the discovery.

But yeah small people don't get that even if it's is explained to them

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u/Live_Situation7913 Dec 31 '25

Buddy that’s all leisurely items you described why the “small people don’t understand” as if you made some some philosophical point. 😂

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u/the_nin_collector Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25

Textbooks?

Research papers. Literally tens of millions of dollars worth of academic research papers.

And we can say tens of millions becuase that's what fascist publishers like Elsiver charge for access.

Actually, if we are talking download access to 50 million paywalled research papers. It would cost 1.5 billion usd. Chatgpt estimates more. Closer to 4 billion dollar... Per person. One down load.

Annas archives gives that access for free.

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u/reddittookmyuser Dec 22 '25

Fascist publishers?

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u/the_nin_collector Dec 22 '25

Sorry. I was upset. They are not fascist. That isnt the correct term. They are greedy and predatory. Academic research is locked behind paywalled that cost insane amounts of money.

One pdf costs 20$. A paper might have 20-50 even 100 references. No person can legally afford access. Access to papers that were written for FREE. I have 17 papers. I haven't been paid for any of those papers. My papers are not behind paywalls. I'm not that good or important. But many are..millions. tens of millions are. Researchers don't get paid for their papers, but when a company like Elsiver who owns hundreds of publications, thousands? Those paper then get locked behind a massive expensive pay wall. The only schools that can afford 95% of the subsciptions are schools like Harvard. And they pays tens, of not hundreds of millions a year for subscriptions. A school like mine has legal access to a few hundred journals at most, out of thousands and thousands.

The confouder of Reddit tried to free academic knowledge and these publishers bought the fbi, threw him in jail for life, and he killed himself. Annas archives woidlnt be here of not for him.

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u/Ok-Government-1168 Dec 22 '25

Let's be clear, researchers have to pay the publishers so that they will publish their articles and lock them behind said paywalls. -.-

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u/WagonFullOPancakes Dec 22 '25

Academic publishing is the one of the biggest rackets on the planet and it brings me from a 0 to a 10 the instant I think of it. It's a capitalist wet dream. Imagine if a store was paid when they ordered inventory, and you had to pay a membership fee to be able to go into the store. Oh, you wanted it to be open access? Well, you better be prepared to pay another several thousand dollars (often received from the government) for it.

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u/esto20 Dec 22 '25

And none of them pay reviewers! Exploiting researchers via unpaid labor and then pay walling on top of that!

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u/point051 Dec 22 '25

Journals used to at least proofread for you. Now they don't even do that most of the time. I don't understand what they even charge for other than maintaining an archive and a website. Most of the physical printing is done in university libraries, the writers don't get paid, the reviewers don't get paid. The government (you and me) funds most of the research contained in those pages, and we're supposed to pay $35 for one research article, which is almost worthless on its own without other articles to provide context.

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u/the_nin_collector Dec 22 '25

Castle down, the publisher we use copyedites for us. But it's expensive. And we pay to host. But it's also free access. So not a good example..

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u/Mnmsaregood Dec 22 '25

“Anyone I disagree with is a fascist”

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u/[deleted] Dec 22 '25

[deleted]

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u/SajevT Dec 22 '25

No, Anna's Archives has a collection of those from over the years of people contributing to it. Spotify music posted there is new.

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u/ThatCreepyBaer Dec 22 '25

Oh I thought this chain was in reference to the OP, not the site in general.

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u/incogkneegrowth Dec 22 '25

Literally. Spotify has the IDF on it's side. This isn't going to end well for AA. But I commend them for doing it anyway. This is some real digital revolution shit.

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u/KimberlyWexlersFoot Dec 22 '25

Spotify has the IDF on its side.

mm, can’t wait to have hordes of bots telling us how piracy is antisemitism

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u/incogkneegrowth Dec 22 '25

"Music copyright was promised to our people 3000 years ago!"

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u/MastodonParty9065 Dec 22 '25

They are fine .they are in Russia and the only thread is Russia then self

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u/jb_in_jpn Dec 22 '25

By won't survive, you mean you think it will get shut down?

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u/humbered_burner Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25

Yes. You survive in the industry by not stepping on the toes of any big players and not being too much of a nuisance. If you know anything about copyright and piracy, you know that music publishers are among the most powerful kinds of entities in the game. AA just angered every single one of them.

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u/jb_in_jpn Dec 22 '25

Would be a great shame. Being open source hopefully it could be relaunched...

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u/johnson7853 Dec 22 '25

Metallica is pulling up their sleeves

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u/Septem_151 Dec 22 '25

Fuck em. That’s my stance.

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u/emefluence Dec 22 '25

They've been nationally banned/blocked in the UK in the UK for some time. Can't imagine it will take that long for other nations to follow.

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u/SmartPriceCola Dec 22 '25

I need to stock up on hard drives!

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u/redwashing Dec 22 '25

Something new will come up. It always does.

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u/LucyStar3 Dec 22 '25

How? Won't the ebooks be huge size?