A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
