The RIAA's newest piracy list is led by a site with a $322 million judgment it will probably never collect

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The RIAA has submitted its 15-page "Notorious Markets" filing to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative for the 2026 edition, and the headliner is a familiar name: Anna's Archive, the shadow library that the trade group says downloaded and threatened to release nearly 90 million music files from Spotify (per Digital Music News). Joining it on the list is a newer and, for the music industry, more uncomfortable entry: Lalals, a UAE-based platform selling AI voice cloning, voice changing, stem splitting, AI song generation, and AI cover tools — including soundalike vocal models of commercially prominent artists — at $12.99 to $24.99 per month.

The filing's timing is doing a lot of work. It arrives roughly six months after the industry won one of the largest piracy judgments in history against its top-listed target — and that judgment illustrates exactly what a "Notorious Markets" listing is and isn't worth.

The Anna's Archive arc, briefly

The story moved fast. In December 2025, Anna's Archive — until then primarily a piracy library for books and academic papers — announced it had scraped 86 million songs from Spotify and planned to distribute them as bulk torrents. Spotify and the three major labels sued in New York federal court by year's end; Judge Jed S. Rakoff granted a restraining order on January 2 that took the site's domain offline (Billboard reported).

Then in February, the site's operators released torrents anyway — access to more than 2 billion illegal music files, by the labels' count, 120,000 of which Spotify's lawyers downloaded as a test. In April, Judge Rakoff entered a default judgment: $300 million to Spotify under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions ($2,500 per circumvention × 120,000 downloads) plus $22.2 million to the majors ($150,000 per willful infringement × 148 identified recordings) — $322.2 million in total, plus a permanent injunction requiring ISPs to disable the site.

Two details from that judgment now double as the punchline of the RIAA's new filing. First, the identities of Anna's Archive's operators remain unknown, which makes the $322 million essentially uncollectable — a point the USTR filing itself reiterates. Second, the site has simply relaunched on new domains, as it does every time one is shut down. The judgment was real; the money and the shutdown were not.

(Worth noting for precision: Billboard's reporting through the litigation consistently put the scrape at 86 million songs, while the RIAA's filing says "nearly 90 million" music files — a discrepancy in framing, not necessarily in fact, since files and songs are not identical units. The filing's larger number has not been independently reconciled here.)

What's new: Lalals, and the awkward economics of unauthorized AI voice

The more forward-looking part of the filing is Lalals. Unlike Anna's Archive, which is straightforward piracy, Lalals represents the category the industry has struggled to contain legally: AI tools that don't distribute copyrighted recordings but imitate the voices that made them famous. The RIAA's description of the platform's offerings — "voice changing, voice cloning, text-to-speech, stem splitting, AI song generation, mastering, and AI cover tools" — reads less like a piracy site and more like a shadow version of products the authorized industry is now racing to ship.

That's the detail worth sitting with: at $24.99 per month for the Pro tier, Lalals is priced like a premium creative tool, not a gray-market bargain. DMN makes the connection explicit — the listing lands "as Suno, Spotify, and more prep authorized artist-specific products." The industry's answer to unauthorized voice cloning, in other words, is to compete with it: licensed soundalike products with the artist's consent and cut. The RIAA listing is the stick in that carrot-and-stick strategy, and its inclusion of Lalals signals that AI voice platforms — not just torrent sites — are now formally part of the piracy infrastructure as the labels define it.

The enforcement question is the same one Anna's Archive already answered: a UAE-based platform named to a U.S. trade list faces no immediate legal consequence from the listing itself. The list is a name-and-shame instrument that sets up future litigation and diplomatic pressure; it is not enforcement.

The list's quiet omissions

Two subtractions are as informative as the additions. The stream-ripper Snaptube, which appeared in the 2025 filing, is absent from the 2026 version, along with download sites Newalbumreleases and Hiphopkit. DMN's read is that they "made way" for the newcomers — the list has finite attention, and the priority shifted from stream-ripping to bulk library theft and AI cloning.

And then there is X. The IFPI's parallel EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List submission takes aim at the platform — an entirely unsurprising move, as DMN drily notes, from a European regulator aimed at an American tech company. But X, which actively promotes major-label releases through its @Music account, did not make the RIAA's version. Whatever the reasoning, the same platform is a piracy concern in Brussels and a promotional partner in Washington. Both organizations would surely explain the difference through evidence and mandate; the optics are nonetheless a neat illustration of whose interests each list serves.

What a listing actually buys you

The Notorious Markets mechanism has a defensible track record as scaffolding: it builds the record that supports lawsuits like the one that produced the $322 million Anna's Archive judgment, and that judgment — uncollectable as it is — did produce a court order ISPs must honor and a legal precedent for the next case. That is not nothing.

But the 2026 filing's two headline entries show the mechanism's ceiling. One target already has a nine-figure judgment against it and is operating anyway. The other sells voice cloning by subscription, in a category where the authorized alternative doesn't fully exist yet. Naming them is cheap; collecting from them is the part the industry hasn't solved. The list tells you who the RIAA is worried about. It does not tell you what anyone can do about them — and in 2026, that gap is the story.

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