A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
