A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
