A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
