The Pop Corporation

Have you heard of Anna’s Archive? Well, it was a project that mirrored libraries from streaming services. You might say they were like a library, trying to preserve all the recorded music, via Bit Torrents. That’s what they said, and it all wasn’t readily searchable from your average internet user either.

Of course, there’s no one name behind Anna’s Archive as it is run anonymously, not that the law and music biz cared.

The archive has been found guilty of scraping “nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings” from Spotify, and has now been ordered to pay up £237million in the process.

Spotify – alongside Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment – sued Anna’s Archive for $13trillion, which is a hilarious amount of money, and it was claimed that the group had made off with “256 million rows of track metadata and 86million audio files, to be distributed on P2P networks”, with Spotify adding that Anna’s Archive was “nefarious”.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff sided with the plaintiffs, and handed out a whopper of a fine, with the record companies getting $7million in damages, while Spotify are set to receive $300million. It’s kinda funny that the streaming service is awarded more than the record companies who paid for the recordings and promo in the first place.

Welcome to 2026.

Either way, will any of these parties see any money? We say that because Anna’s Archive is completely anonymous, so no-one knows who exactly will cough up. The judge could have awarded them cheese the size of a planet, or a hundred golden toilets. It all feels very useless, but at least wealthy companies have a moral victory they can hang up in their offices.