A hacktivist group calling itself Anna’s Archive recently claimed it scraped almost the entire Spotify catalog—around 86 million tracks, covering roughly 99% of all music streams on the platform. Not removed. Not deleted. Just copied, at massive scale.
They framed it as preservation. An archive. Almost like a Wikipedia offline dump—but for music.
And that comparison is tempting. Wikipedia openly allows full database dumps. Knowledge is meant to be shared, copied, preserved. No royalties. No artists losing income. No complicated middle ground. Music is different.
Every track has a creator behind it. A livelihood. Rights. Royalties—small as they already are. So while Wikipedia sharing feels clean, music sharing is messy. Someone always pays the price, and it’s usually the artist.
Still, the scrape exposed something uncomfortable.
Spotify is known for being one of the most paranoid platforms. Locked-down accounts. DRM. Aggressive bot detection. AI-driven defenses against fraud, fake streams, and abuse. And yet, it still happened. Which makes you wonder what was really being protected.
It feels like a platform busy securing war defenses—AI battles, data battles, behavior battles—while missing the obvious truth. If music is streamable, it is copyable. There is no firewall against sound.
It’s like a house with every door locked, even the CR, but the windows left open—because people still need air. Access is the window. Streaming is the window. And scraping simply climbed through it.
Streaming was supposed to solve piracy. No more downloading. No more hoarding MP3s. Just press play and move on. But instead of killing piracy, it only reshaped it. From individual downloads to automated harvesting. From one song to entire catalogs.
And this is where regret enters.
Because when everything is rented, nothing is yours. You don’t own the music. You don’t keep it. You don’t pass it on. You can’t ask an artist to sign your phone. You can’t hand down a playlist. You can’t keep a song when a platform changes its rules or disappears.
That’s why physical media is quietly coming back. Vinyl. Cassette. CD. Even simple MP3 files. Not because they’re trendy, but because ownership matters.
A record can be signed. A CD can age with you. An MP3 works offline, free from algorithms and policy shifts. Streaming promised convenience, but people want permanence.
In the end, Spotify didn’t solve piracy. It just closed one door and opened another—leading people back to physical media, digital files, and the human need to keep what they love.
Some things shouldn’t be rented forever. Some things deserve to stay.
Boycott Spotify.
Uninstall Spotify.
Support Bandcamp artists.
Install Bandcamp.
⌨ ᴛʸᵖⁱⁿᵍ ᴏᵘᵗ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ʙˡᵘᵉ ᵈᵃʳᵉᵐ ᵐᵘˢⁱᶜ ᵇˡᵒᵍ
