A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Observers noted the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
