A 300TB backup of Spotify has just arrived; here’s what you can access today.

      The initial public release consists of metadata torrents, with music files expected to be released thereafter, arranged by popularity and designed for mirroring by anyone with available storage.

      A well-known archive hub claims to have released a Spotify backup as bulk torrents amounting to 300TB or approximately 86 million music files, organized by their popularity. However, if you're looking for a straightforward and comprehensive mirror of Spotify's catalog to download all at once, that's not what is currently available.

      The present offering includes catalog data: SQLite databases that the organization asserts contain the world's largest publicly accessible music metadata database, featuring details on 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.

      Anna’s Archive generally focuses on text due to its density, but is committed to preserving knowledge and culture across various media. It also states that it has discovered a method to scrape Spotify on a large scale, viewing this as the beginning of a music archive focused on preservation. If this archive seems overwhelming, you might consider utilizing Spotify’s own offline feature.

      Details included in the database release

      In its announcement, the group emphasizes that while music is already quite well preserved, it identifies three key gaps: a long tail that is only retained when someone shows interest (and torrents can suffer from poor seeding), an inclination towards large lossless files that complicates preservation efforts, and the absence of a definitive torrent list intended to represent all recorded music.

      The Spotify metadata release is proposed as a solution. It claims to have metadata coverage for nearly 99.9% of artists, albums, and tracks, with the core dataset of artists, albums, and tracks being under 200GB when compressed, alongside a separate audio analysis dataset compressed to 4TB.

      Audio releases are being delivered in batches

      Audio is the element that will likely interest many readers most, and it is still being distributed. Anna’s Archive indicates that it has archived roughly 86 million music files, accounting for about 99.6% of listens, but those files will be released in order of popularity rather than all at once.

      The group also highlights quality options. For tracks with a popularity greater than 0, original OGG Vorbis files at 160kbit/s were used without re-encoding. For tracks with a popularity of 0, these were re-encoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s and it notes a bug with the ReplayGain tag affecting various files.

      What to expect next

      The organization has set a cutoff date of July 2025, suggesting that releases after this date may not be included. It also outlines upcoming steps: music files will be released first, followed by additional file metadata (paths and checksums), then album art and patch files meant for reconstructing originals. The key takeaway is that currently, this backup consists solely of metadata, with audio available later on.