A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
