An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
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 providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
