The political economy of the open music metadata ecosystem—and the impact of the Spotify hack

Abstract This article examines the persistent crisis of music metadata and its implications for discoverability, attribution and remuneration. It distinguishes four key categories of metadata and argues that rights-related metadata is both the most economically consequential and the hardest to produce and maintain, because it encodes complex, jurisdiction-specific and dynamically changing relationships among creators, intermediaries and users. The paper shows how legal theory and tradition, the fragmentation of copyright and licensing and the proliferation of heterogeneous intermediaries have jointly prevented the emergence of comprehensive public or private registries. It reviews three major families of attempted solutions: centralized institutional initiatives (eg CMO-led registries), open peer-produced datasets (eg MusicBrainz, Discogs), and blockchain/smart contract–based projects, and explains why each has, so far, failed to deliver an authoritative, rights-inclusive global repertoire database. The analysis situates these failures within broader industry transformations: the democratization of music production, the financialization of rights, the consolidation of power at a few digital service providers and the dual role of AI as both a tool for metadata generation and a driver of repertoire inflation through generative systems. The paper also discusses the 2025 leak of Spotify’s metadata and audio catalogue via Anna’s Archive, interpreting it as a paradigmatic turning point. The sudden availability of the largest publicly accessible, rights-linked music metadata set in history raises legal, institutional and sustainability questions. The article concludes with recommendations towards a more equitable and efficient music data commons—not shying away from the use of the leaked Spotify dataset.