A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
