An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital 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 “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
