An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass 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, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
