A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means 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 frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
