Spotify and the three main major record labels – Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment – have sued Anna’s Archive for $13trillion. They allege that the platform scraped 86million music files.
Anna’s Archive was formerly known as the Pirate Library Mirror, and confirmed last month that it was going to create “the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music”.
It said that it was going to be available through BitTorrent, and Billboard claimed that the group had scraped “256 million rows of track metadata and 86million audio files, to be distributed on P2P networks”.
Anna’s Archive denied claims of piracy given that it does not directly host any files, and Spotify spoke out against the “nefarious” group at the end of last month, claiming that it was “engaged in unlawful scraping”.
The streaming giant also added that it had “implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour”.
“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,” the statement continued.
Now, Spotify has joined up with the three big record labels to file a lawsuit against Anna’s Archive. The filing alleges that the platform scraped 86 million music files – equating to chat it claims is $13trillion in damages, or roughly $151,000 per file.
It claims that the pirate platform is behind the “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings.
As reported by outlets including Music Business Worldwide, the filing was made on December 26 2025, and unsealed on January 16. The outlets also share that the labels and the streaming giant have sought a temporary restraining order, and Anna’s Archive did not respond to the legal action by the court appointed date of January 16.
A preliminary injunction against Anna’s Archive was issued last week (January 20) by Judge Jed S. Rakoff (as per Consequence). It required hosting providers and domain registries to disable access to domains including annas-archive.org, annas-archive.li, annas-archive.se, and more.
At time of writing, Anna’s Archive has not issued a public comment in response to the court proceedings or the preliminary injunction.
This isn’t the only instance where Spotify has made headlines in recent weeks. Towards the end of 2025, there was a campaign launched called Spotify Unwrapped, which called for a boycott of the service over alleged AI music and ads for ICE being found on the app.
It was launched by three grassroots organisations who were behind the No Kings protests in the US earlier this year – 5050 Movement, Indivisible Project and Working Families.
The platform, which has over 700million active users, has also come under scrutiny in the past regarding the amount of money it pays to artists. One of the acts to have spoken out about the amount they make from streaming is Los Campesinos!, who revealed their earnings to fans last month.
