Advocacy Group Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Audio Tracks from Spotify
An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of the service”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors 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 suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.