A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio 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.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, 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 leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
