A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told 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 committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
