What We Learned from Anna’s Archive’s Spotify Scrape

As reported previously, Open Shadow Library Anna’s Archive has scraped Spotify with the aim of building “a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.” The metadata revealed some interesting statistics about the content on the streaming service.

The stats:

• According to Anna’s Archives, at least 70% of the songs on Spotify have a stream count of less than 1000.

• It estimates that at the time of scraping, the most popular three songs ("Die With A Smile" by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" by Billie Eilish and "DtMF" by Bad Bunny) had a higher total stream count than the bottom 20-100 million songs combined.

• Anna’s has archived around 86 million songs, ordered by popularity descending, which may only represent 37% of songs, but represents around 99.6% of listens.

• Some songs have up to 20 different versions, as quantified by counting the number of songs per ISRC.

• The most common duration of songs on Spotify is two minutes exactly (roughly 2.25 million), followed by three minutes exactly (roughly 2.2 million) and four minutes exactly (roughly 1.72 million).

• 34.5 million songs are rated explicit, with 221.5 million clean.

• Music is being added to Spotify in greater numbers each year, with 10+ million albums uploaded to the service that were released in 2024, compared with roughly 8 million in 2023. Anna’s Archive attributes the leap to procedurally and AI generated content.

• C major is the most popular key for songs on Spotify (9.3%), followed by G major (8.3%). In terms of minor keys, A minor (4.6%) is tied with B minor.

Spotify’s response:

• Following news of the scraping, Spotify released a statement to Digital Music News.

• “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior. Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”