A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, 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 inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
