An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary 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 Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent 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 issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
