A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, 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,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
