Spotify Track Leak is quite a sensational headline, so let's figure out what really happened. Activists from the Anna's Archive Project announced the creation of a Spotify music archive. The collection includes 86 million tracks, totaling 300 terabytes. According to the creators of the archive, the main purpose of this "preservation archive" is to preserve humanity's musical heritage.
Anna's Archive positions itself as a project dedicated to "preserving the knowledge and heritage of humanity." Specialists created the Spotify music archive by posting links on their website to download the collection.
The collection includes 86 million songs, and original metadata is provided for each song. The method used to download the songs is not specified. Spotify called the incident a leak, confirming the authenticity of the materials collected by Anna's Archive.
Spotify's entire media library contains approximately 256 million tracks. According to representatives of the archive, the tracks they have collected account for 99.6% of the music service's plays, forming the basis of the catalog.
A large HTML file with a description is attached to the archive. The file lists the 10,000 most popular songs from the archive, which were ranked based on the music platform's public statistics.
All compositions are available for download in OGG format with a bitrate of 160 kbps. The archivists clarified that their goal was not to achieve the highest quality of the compositions, but rather to "preserve the musical heritage of humanity" in a compact form.
Let's discuss this subject. Do you think there is any point in creating this kind of archives? Can this "track leak" be considered a hacker attack on Spotify? Will there be further legal proceedings on the part of Spotify? - After all, these archivists simply made the tracks freely available. Write your opinions in the comments section below, we are happy to discuss this with you.
Regarding our opinion, we don't see the point in creating such archives, and Spotify should take better care of the security of its platform's data. The only thing we liked about this whole story was the entertaining infographics (such as Top 30 music genres by artist count, genre hierarchy, artists by popularity score, and so on) on the Anna's Archive website.
