Spotify scrape hits 300 TB, but you have nothing to worry about

The end of 2025 is bringing an eyebrow-raising story that involves Spotify. The world's most popular music streaming service might be dealing with a massive data leak.

300 TB is a lot

According to reports, the scrape includes 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files, intended to be shared via P2P networks in torrents totaling roughly 300 terabytes. As of now, only the metadata has been publicly released, not the music files themselves.

Spotify confirmed the incident, saying a third party accessed public metadata and used unauthorized methods to bypass DRM and reach some audio files. The company said it is actively investigating the breach.

Are my playlists gone?

No, so far, there aren't any complaints from Spotify users about anything changing on their end.

But experts and industry observers have noted the potential implications. Yoav Zimmerman, CEO of media startup Third Chair, suggested that, in theory, anyone with enough storage and a personal streaming server could recreate a free Spotify-like service with music up to 2025. The main limitations would be copyright law and enforcement.

While Spotify's full library is larger than the dataset reported, the scale of this scrape could surpass the biggest publicly available music archive, MusicBrainz, which holds about five million tracks.

Anna's Archive, known for preserving books and papers, framed the project as part of its mission to safeguard cultural knowledge, describing the Spotify scrape as an effort to build a music archive focused on preservation. The group acknowledged that Spotify doesn't contain all music but called the dataset a strong starting point.

"This is the world's first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space)", the group says.

The fine line

This incident shows just how tempting and vulnerable massive digital libraries can be, even with DRM protection in place. For now, most users aren't directly affected, but the metadata release underscores the challenges of keeping online media secure and the fine line between preservation and piracy.