A popular archive hub claims to have released a Spotify backup as bulk torrents totaling 300TB, or about 86 million music files, grouped by popularity. If you’re expecting a clean, complete mirror of Spotify’s catalog that you can download all at once, that’s not live today.
Live is the catalog data: SQLite databases, which the group says contains the largest publicly available music metadata database, covering 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
Anna’s Archive states that it typically focuses on text because it is dense, but its mission is to preserve knowledge and culture across media. The company also says it has found a way to exploit Spotify at scale and sees this as a start to building a music archive focused on preservation. If this archive is too large, Spotify’s offline feature may be just what you need.
What the database version includes
In their article, the group argues that music is already pretty well preserved, but points to three gaps: a long tail that only gets saved if someone cares enough about it (and torrents are bad at seeding), an audiophile penchant for huge lossless files that makes it difficult to keep “everything,” and the lack of a reliable torrent list meant to represent all recorded music.
The Spotify metadata dump is positioned as a solution. The metadata is claimed to cover approximately 99.9% of artists, albums and tracks, with the core artist, album and track data set compressed at less than 200GB and additionally a separate audio analysis data set listed at 4TB compressed.
Audio comes in batches
Audio is the part that will be most important to many readers, and this part is still being introduced. Anna’s Archive claims to have archived around 86 million music files, which represents around 99.6% of listeners. However, these music files are scheduled to be released in order of popularity, not as a single drop.
Quality decisions are also highlighted. A popularity greater than 0 means that the original OGG Vorbis was retrieved at 160 kbit/s without reencoding. A popularity score of 0 means it was re-encoded at 75 kbit/s in OGG Opus and indicates a ReplayGain tag bug that affects many files.
What to watch next
The group gives a deadline of 2025-07, meaning releases after July 2025 may not exist. It also describes the next steps: music files, then additional file metadata (paths and checksums), then album art and patch files to reconstruct the originals. The practical aspect is that this backup is only metadata for now, while the audio data comes in later.
