From PC World: In what surely amounts as one of the most brazen digital music heists of all time, a group of hackers says it has “backed up” Spotify’s music files and metadata, and it plans on releasing the files publicly in a massive “preservation archive.”
In a blog post detailing its exploits, Anna’s Archives claims it managed to scrape 86 million Spotify tracks, representing more than 99 percent of the streamer’s “listens.” The group also nabbed the metadata for 256 million tracks, encompassing practically all of Spotify’s music catalog.
The hackers say they will release the data—all 300TB worth—on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks in a “humble attempt to start…a ‘preservation archive’ for music.” For now, only the metadata has been released, according to Music Ally.
In a statement, Spotify said it had discovered “a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files,” according to Billboard, which first reported the breach. “We are actively investigating the incident.”
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