Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Extracted Countless of Music Tracks from Spotify
An activist organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said 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 its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.