An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed 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 fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
