An activist organization has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably 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 group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
