Spotify launches $13 trillion lawsuit over “theft” of 86 million songs

Spotify has launched a joint lawsuit over the “theft” of 256 million music files, equating to 86 million songs from the streaming platform.

Back on December 23, 2025, Spotify opened an investigation after Anna’s Archive scraped 300TB of metadata – roughly 256 million commercial audio files, claiming to represent “99.6% of all listens on Spotify.”

Now, one month on, Spotify has joined forces with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment to jointly sue Anna’s Archive, seeking damages up to $13 trillion.

The lawsuit was filed on December 26, 2026, and publicized on January 16, 2026, as Music Business Worldwide first reported. It argues “such widespread and illegal infringement would irreparably harm the music industry.”

Spotify seeking $13 trillion in damages from Anna’s Archive

Anna’s Archive is an online platform that has described itself as “the largest truly open library in human history.” Primarily, the service focused on written material, sharing sources for million of books. Recently, however, it also sought to cover musical material as well.

Spotify

Spotify is just one of the entities involved in the $13 trillion lawsuit. Yes, trillion with a ‘T’.

The caveat is in how Anna’s Archive functions. See, the service doesn’t directly host any files. Rather than pushing illegaly obtained novels or Billboard-charting tunes, it instead refers users to third-party sites and services that host them. In essence, it’s a search engine.

Nonetheless, the lawsuit claims the impacted parties are “entitled to statutory damages in the amount of up to $150,000 for each work.” In other words, six-figures for each song, equating to the $13 trillion sum.

The collective labelled it as “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings,” describing Anna’s Archive and its operators as a “group of internet pirates with no regard for the law.”

Anna’s Archive has not publicly addressed the matter since the lawsuit was filed.