A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known 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 represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
