A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
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 album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented 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 defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
