What feels like an epic digital mixtape leak is actually a wild collision of piracy, preservation claims and internet chaos.

Spotify, the streaming giant that most of us use daily for curated playlists and daily mixes, is facing one of the biggest data shakeups in music history. A group calling itself Anna’s Archive says it scraped nearly all of Spotify’s music catalog, grabbing metadata on 256 million tracks along with a huge chunk of audio files that add up to roughly 300 terabytes of music science fiction vibes. The music world is buzzing, Gen Z is online, and the hashtag chaos is real.

Officially Spotify confirmed that a third party accessed public metadata and some audio files and that it has disabled accounts involved in the scraping. The company insists no private user data was leaked and that the platform is still safe to stream on while it investigates.

The hacker group claims that the 86 million audio files they pulled represent almost 99.6 percent of all listens on Spotify. The remaining 256 million track records include everything from song titles, album details and artist profiles to popularity data that define how songs get pushed or buried in the algorithm.

Here is the twist that makes this feel like a weird internet movie. Anna’s Archive frames itself not just as hackers but as “digital preservationists.” They say they want to build an open music archive to preserve humanity’s musical heritage forever, like a Spotify museum gone wild on peer-to-peer networks. Whether that’s noble or naive is up for heated debate online.

People on Reddit and music forums are reacting wildly. Some users celebrate the idea of limitless access to music. Other folks warn that this could spell disaster for artists if audio files get shared widely and royalties vanish forever. Still others worry this might fuel next-level AI models trained on the entire canon of recorded music.

Spotify says it is doubling down on security and working with the music industry to protect creators and copyright. That is important to younger artists who already feel squeezed by streaming economics.