A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
