Piracy activist group Anna’s Archive announced that they had “backed up” 86 million songs and 186 million ISRC codes with 300TB of data available for download via Torrent on Saturday.
Anna’s Archive did this backup to ensure that it would remain for future users since not all music on Spotify exists in physical form. If Spotify were to cease operations tomorrow, music that is not popular and does not have a physical version would be lost forever. Only 86 million of the 256 million songs offered by Spotify are backed up by Anna’s Archive. This is because 86 million songs represent 99.6% of the total streaming on Spotify.
The backed up music files are in the OGG Opus format with a bit rate of 75kbit/s. It was originally in the OGG Vorbis format with a bit rate of 160kbit/s but was downscaled to allow this music library to be downloaded in a smaller size. According to Anna's Archive, their collection of music data and metadata is the largest ever produced in history.