An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote 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 its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, 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,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
