An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation 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 “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
