Advocacy Group Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Music Files from the Streaming Giant
An activist group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed 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 fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.