A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training 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 said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
