Spotify wins $322m from pirates nobody can find

Spotify and the three major music labels have secured a $322 million default judgement against Anna's Archive, the shadow library that scraped 86 million songs from Spotify's platform and announced plans to release them publicly via BitTorrent.

The only problem: nobody knows who actually operates the site, and collecting a nine-figure damages award from an anonymous entity is a different challenge entirely from winning one.

In December 2024, Anna's Archive made an announcement that it had downloaded what it claimed was almost the total amount of commercial sound recordings from Spotify, referring to its act as a "music preservation archive".

The copyright infringement case was filed by Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music in January 2025. According to these companies, this act of Anna's Archive was nothing but audacious stealing that the music industry had not yet witnessed before from a single organisation.

However, this shadow library did not stop itself from continuing the activity even after filing the case. Torrents of almost three million music files were made available in February 2025 by Anna's Archive.

Jed Rakoff, a judge of the Southern District of New York, has now made a default judgement against the defendants after their failure to appear in court. The damage award in this case is set at $300 million in favour of Spotify.

The three record labels, UMG, WMG, and Sony Music, received a total judgement of $22.2 million. The judgement also includes a permanent injunction that would see ISPs block Anna's Archive's website, while the library was ordered to delete any and all copies of the music it has harvested using its scraping methods.

Default judgements occur if the defendant is absent during the lawsuit, meaning that Anna's Archive did not have any time to provide its defence during the hearings.

From Billboard's reports, it has been learned that Anna's Archive has a history of just restarting itself under other domain names if blocked by ISPs. Moreover, there are no identities associated with the archive, and it operates through anonymous individuals or organisations.