An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, 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.
