An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote 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 Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
