An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing 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 knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
