America News Agency

According to Spotify, this was done using an illegal method called “scraping,” which involves using software to automatically collect large amounts of data.

A group of hackers calling themselves Anna's Archive is behind the scraping operation. On its website, the group says it copied 86 million songs. That corresponds to 37% of all songs on Spotify, but according to Anna's Archive, they copied the most-listened-to tracks—accounting for more than 99% of all plays.

Spotify did not verify the figures itself, but said this was not all of its content. Meanwhile, the service is tightening its security.

According to the hacker group, the goal of copying so many songs is to preserve music for future generations.

The group wrote on its site: “Copying Spotify is our attempt to create a preservation archive for music. Spotify, of course, doesn’t have all the world’s music, but it’s a good start.”

The group’s website already provides access to a large number of digital books and other written sources.

According to The Guardian, Spotify is investigating the incident and “identified and disabled malicious accounts involved in illegal copying.”

Spotify said an investigation into unauthorized access found that a third party collected publicly available metadata and used illegal methods to bypass digital rights systems to access some audio files on the platform.

The hacker group has not yet made the music publicly available, but said it plans to do so.