An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize 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.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
