An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized 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 accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation 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 government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
