An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
