A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models 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.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
