A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told 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 committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
