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Saved February 14, 2026
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Anna's Archive has created a massive preservation archive of Spotify's music, including around 86 million files and metadata for 256 million tracks. The project aims to ensure access to a wide range of music, especially less popular tracks often overlooked by other preservation efforts.
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Anna's Archive has launched a massive backup of Spotify, encompassing around 86 million music files and the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks. The project aims to create a "preservation archive" for music, allowing anyone with sufficient disk space to mirror the data. Unlike previous efforts that focus on popular artists or high-quality recordings, this archive attempts to address the long tail of music that often gets overlooked. The files are distributed in bulk torrents, totaling roughly 300TB.
The collection includes metadata for nearly all tracks on Spotify, prioritizing based on popularity. For songs with popularity greater than zero, the original audio quality is retained at 160kbit/s OGG Vorbis. For less popular tracks, the audio is reencoded to a lower quality of 75kbit/s OGG Opus. The data will be released in stages, with the metadata already available and music files set to follow based on popularity. Although Spotify does not encompass every song ever produced, this effort represents a significant step toward preserving music history.
Statistics reveal that a vast majority of tracks on Spotify are rarely listened to. Over 70% of songs have less than 1,000 streams, while a small fraction of popular songs accounts for the majority of listens. The top three songs have stream counts surpassing those of the bottom 20-100 million songs combined. This uneven distribution highlights the challenges in music preservation and underscores the need for comprehensive archiving efforts. Anna's Archive is responding to this gap, emphasizing that even lesser-known tracks deserve preservation.
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