The Recording Industry Association of America has submitted its latest overview of notorious markets to the United States government, listing familiar targets alongside two newcomers.
Each year the US Trade Representative invites rightsholders and other stakeholders to nominate foreign sites and services for its notorious markets list. The review makes no legal findings; it is intended to encourage the listed services, and the countries they operate from, to act against piracy and counterfeiting.
The RIAA's submission names torrent sites, stream-rippers and cyberlockers, many of them flagged in previous years, among them The Pirate Bay and Rapidgator. The notable additions are the shadow library Anna's Archive and the AI voice-cloning service Lalals, which the RIAA presents as additional areas of concern rather than formal watchlist candidates.
Anna's Archive came to the music industry's attention in December last year, when it announced that it had downloaded 86 million music files from Spotify, along with metadata for 256 million tracks.
The response was rapid. The RIAA coordinated an emergency court action on behalf of its members and Spotify, which produced a temporary restraining order. The domain registry PIR then suspended the site's .org domain, and the RIAA says Cloudflare also stopped providing it with services.
The site initially reported that its Spotify metadata torrent was "unavailable until further notice". In February it quietly released roughly 3 million music files, and the torrents for those releases were delisted shortly afterwards.
The litigation continued, with the labels and Spotify prevailing. "On April 14, 2026, RIAA and Spotify obtained a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive," the RIAA writes in its submission.
The music group stresses that, despite the judgment, the site remains reachable through its .gl, .pk and .gd domains.
The RIAA is not alone in flagging it. The Association of American Publishers also lists Anna's Archive as a notorious online site, and reports that traffic to its domains grew 28 per cent despite enforcement efforts, to an average of 41 million visitors a month. The publishers also note that the site offers AI developers high-speed access to its collection in exchange for what it calls an enterprise-level donation.
The AI theme extends to Lalals, a service run by a company based in the United Arab Emirates, which allows users to alter a vocal recording so that it sounds like a well-known artist, such as Taylor Swift or Drake, without that artist's permission.
Taken together, the filings report two figures from the same enforcement campaign, and this newspaper considers both of them worth setting side by side.
The first is $322 million, awarded by default against operators who are unknown. The second is a 28 per cent increase in traffic, to 41 million visitors a month.
Our analysts note the useful property of a judgment against persons unknown: because there is nobody to collect it from, the figure is unconstrained by what anyone could pay. It is a number rather than a debt, and nothing about the case would have been harder had it been larger.
The traffic figure behaves in the opposite way. It is attached to real visitors, it is measured monthly, and it is the one number in the campaign that has moved.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that the enforcement programme is thus reporting complete success and 41 million visitors a month in the same round of submissions, and that the two are not in tension, because they are not measuring the same thing. One records what was awarded. The other records what happened.
The Department has written to ask which figure the USTR intends to use. The site has lost its .org domain and its Cloudflare services, carries a $322 million judgment and is now available on three domains to more people than before, which leaves the question of whether the next submission should report the programme's progress or the site's.