An activist group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “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 key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
