Reports surfaced early Monday (Dec. 22) that a "pirate activist group" had scraped metadata from Spotify's music library and released it to the public. Billboard identified an open source search engine known as Anna's Archive to be among the first to draw attention to the incident.

After a shadow library site claimed to have created a metadata archive of 99.6 percent of Spotify's music, the streaming service said it's shutting down accounts and creating safeguards to protect its...