Spotify cried foul last week when a non-profit hacker project managed to gain access to its metadata and audio files. Spotify referred to Anna’s Archive as “anti-copyright extremists.”
Musicians might note that 87% of tracks will now receive the same payment from Anna’s Archive as they do from Spotify: zero.
Since April 2024, no track with fewer than a thousand streams a year on Spotify can claim any royalties from the platform. According to music data researchers Luminate, that’s 175.5 million tracks unaccounted to by Spotify, out of a total 202 million. Demonetizing these tracks was a unilateral decision by the platform with no approval from rights holders. It is, you might say, anti-copyright in the extreme.
