A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify 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 copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
