An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, 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 service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course 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 information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission 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 science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting 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.
