An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Observers said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music 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 sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service 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 information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated 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 LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
