Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture

What would happen to the world's music collections if streaming services disappeared? One hacktivist group says it has a solution: scrape around 300 terabytes of music and metadata from Spotify and offer it up for free as what it calls the world’s first “fully open” music preservation archive.

The scraping appears to have been carried out by people associated with Anna's Archive, a shadow-library site that focuses on preserving media - traditionally books and academic papers - by aggregating metadata and distributing large datasets rather than directly hosting copyrighted works. In practice, Anna's Archive functions more like a metadata search engine, allowing users to find the content they want and connecting them with downloads, usually via torrent, from other sources to reduce legal liability. 

In a Saturday blog post, the group said it couldn't pass up an opportunity "outside of text" to scrape Spotify at scale, claiming ...