An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing 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 distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
