This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 22nd, 2025.

We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and try to help each other understand.

Today, a preservationist group scrapes a huge amount of Spotify's metadata and more than a third of its music files.

Is it piracy, though?

Piracy, they say.

I'm Tom Merritt.

And I'm Rob Dunwood.

Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

So a post on an open source search engine, Anna's archive, notes that the preservationist

group behind Anna's archive found a way to scrape metadata

and music files at scale from Spotify and is making them available as torrents.

Anna's archive says that it normally focuses on preserving text.

You may have run across them where they have open sourced books that maybe

authors did not want to be made open source. But it says that music is fairly well preserved,

so it hasn't gone after music as much. However, when they figured out that they could do this

at scale, they realized that they

could take this action to preserve a long tail of less popular artists, preserve at smaller file

sizes, since most people who preserve their own music do it at high bit rates, high quality,

you know, flacks, that kind of thing.

And also contribute to the creation of an authoritative list that could represent metadata for all music ever produced, something that they've made progress towards with text,

but doesn't really exist for music.

And as Archive believes, it has obtained metadata for 99.9% of Spotify tracks and accessed about 37% of the music files on Spotify,

...