A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing 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 its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
