A few days before Christmas 2025, a secretive online activist group called Anna’s Archive said it had downloaded roughly 86 million audio files and  256 million rows of track metadata from Spotify’s catalogue.

 Anna’s Archive is a shadow library. It holds one of the world’s largest online collection of pirated books, academic papers and now music. Soon, batches of the files, 300 terrabytes in total, started circulating on torrent file-sharing websites.

By April, a district judge in New York had ordered Anna’s Archive to pay US$322 million dollars in damages to Spotify and three major record labels in a copyright infringement case over the hack. Then following month, the same judge ordered Anna’s Archive pay $19.5 million in damages to a group of 13 major publishers........

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