Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist organization has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
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, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
