An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
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, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation 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 government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
