An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Observers noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious 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 unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation 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, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
