An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
