An activist organization has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 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 Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately 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 a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation 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 government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
